As I write this, a house-sized asteroid is rocketing towards us at 36,126 miles an hour. Scientists have given it the catchy name “2025 TC” and have noted that it’ll pass within 53,400 miles of the Earth’s surface later today. That might sound like a long way away, but in cosmic terms it’s the equivalent of a bullet grazing your skull. Or, to put it another way, NASA confirms that at its nearest, it’ll be nearly five times closer to the Earth than the moon. So, is it time to call up a gang of blue-collar deep-core drillers to make a last-ditch trip to the asteroid and plant a nuclear bomb inside? Well, not quite. 2025 TC is around 45 feet in diameter, so even if it did strike the Earth, it’s very far from a planet-killing disaster. For example, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period was 7 miles wide, roughly the size of Mount Everest, and plunged the Earth into a nuclear winter that took thousands of years to disappear. But what if it did? That said, you still wouldn’t want to be anywhere near 2025 TC if it did strike the Earth. I’ve used the extremely fun Real Asteroid Simulator to see what kind of damage it’d do if 2025 TC were flying directly at the White House. As per the simulation results, there’d be an airburst explosion somewhere between 10-29 kilometers above the Oval Office. Powerful shockwaves, sonic booms, and an intense fireball thermal radiation would result, and every window in a roughly three-kilometer radius would be broken. Fortunately, the White House itself was hardened against nuclear attack during the Cold War and rebuilt with steel beams and reinforced concrete. Unfortunately, anyone dumb enough to still be sitting in the Oval Office would instantly perish in a massive blast of superheated air. If they somehow survived that, the sudden presence of shattered glass, splintered wood, and shards of metal flying through the air at high speeds is unlikely to be conducive to making executive orders anytime soon. However, those who relocated to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center (the “White House bunker”) would probably be fine, as that’s designed to withstand blast overpressure from a nuclear strike, so it should suffice for a minor asteroid of this size. But, as NASA underlines, 2025 TC will be a close call but not a direct impact. Modelling shows that if it did hit, it’d land well offshore in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. No countries, islands, or populated areas are nearby—the closest land is Easter Island to the northeast and Pitcairn Islands to the southwest, both over 1,000 miles away. So, in summary, don’t change your weekend plans.