Recreation of the passage of an asteroid near the EarthGETTYThe asteroid has been called 2022 RM4, travels at 84,500 kilometers per hour and measures between 330 and 740 meters Its closest point to Earth is calculated for November 1 at a distance six times the existing between our planet and the Moon NASA considers “potentially dangerous” any asteroid that passes less than 7.5 million kilometers from Earth NASA has identified a new “potentially dangerous” asteroid that is the size of the largest skyscrapers on the planet (between 330 and 740 meters, according to the calculations that have been made). The meteor, called 2022 RM4, ‘crosses’ the Earth just on Halloween, November 1, at a speed of 84,500 kilometers per hour, 68 times the speed of sound. The distance at which it will pass from Earth does not suppose danger, but it is small when speaking on a spatial scale. The point of closest proximity has been estimated at 2.3 million kilometers, that is, about six times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. By NASA standards that means “close.” Any object that reaches a distance of less than 193 million kilometers. All these asteroids are studied because deviations in their trajectory could end up posing some kind of danger to Earth. In total, there are about 28,000 asteroids of this type whose orbits and trajectories have been monitored since 2017 by the ATLAS alert system, made up of four telescopes. In these five years, only two of those asteroids have impacted the Earth, one in Puerto Rico and another on the border between Botswana and South Africa. In both cases they were small rocks that did not cause any damage. NASA has calculated the trajectories of all these asteroids and comets that it has under surveillance and no large collision is expected for at least the next hundred years. The interest in carrying out this surveillance work and these calculations is not only due to the risk of an asteroid causing a cataclysm. Others of medium size can cause damage similar to a bomb. In 2013 there was such an impact in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. There were 1,500 injured.