No, it’s already flown past and missed. This is one of those examples of news sites taking up a random asteroid for no apparent reason and making a big fuss about it. This happens every few months. 2009ES is an asteroid that missed us by 18.6 times the distance to the Moon on 5th November. It was discovered in 2009 hence the name, and was not discovered by the Chinese. Various news sites that obviously don’t check their sources posted stories about it for the rest of September, even though it had already done its flyby long before.

I think that’s because the original announcement that a Chinese telescope photographed it didn’t give a flyby date. And it was an unremarkable story anyway, because astronomers photograph NEOs every night. There was nothing at all newsworthy about a Chinese telescope photographing a NEO and I have no idea why they ran it.

Here is its JPL page, to find out about flybys, you click on “close approach data”, then you scroll down to the 2015 section of the close flybys

JPL Small-Body Database Browser

It says the minimal distance is 0.0483769470119564 au. So now go to Google and type in 0.0483769470119564 au in kilometers and you’ll see that it missed by more than 7.2 million kilometers.

But the easiest way to check something like this is to go to the Current Impact Risks page. It’s sorted with the highest risks at the top. If the first entry is white or blue, then the asteroid story is a hoax or a mistake because if true there would be at least a yellow entry there at the top of the page (that has happened occasionally).

If it is yellow then the story may be true though probably overhyped as that means that it will almost certainly be downgraded to a miss as they work it out in more detail. If it is orange or red (never happened to date) then there is a genuine risk of some sort of an asteroid hitting Earth and potentially having some effects on us - and you can be sure it will be headline news in all the astronomy news sites and indeed all mainstream news sites as well.

Another approach is just to visit a reputable astronomy website such as Earthsky.org - if we did have something with a predicted impact on Earth, it’s bound to be top news in all the astronomy sites. Even if just a small asteroid due to hit in the middle of the sea or a desert - far the most likely event as they are much more numerous than the larger ones, completely harmless, keen amateur astronomers will want to fly out there and photograph and video it.