An asteroid the size of an SUV passed 2,950 kilometres above Earth, the closest asteroid ever observed passing by our planet, NASA said Tuesday.
If it had been on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid — named 2020 QG — would likely not have caused any damage, instead of disintegrating in the atmosphere, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
The asteroid, which was about three to six meters long, passed above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 9:38 am IST (04.08 GMT).
The circled streak in the centre of this image is asteroid 2020 QG, which came closer to Earth than any other non-impacting asteroid on record. Image Credit: ZTF/Caltech Optical Observatories
It was moving at nearly 12.3 kilometres per second, well below the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles at which most telecommunication satellites fly.
The asteroid was first recorded six hours after its approach by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, as a long trail of light in the sky.
The US space agency said that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a similar distance a few times per year.
But they're difficult to record unless they're heading directly towards the planet, in which case the explosion in the atmosphere is usually noticed — as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when the explosion of an object about 20 metres long shattered windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.
One of NASA's missions is to monitor larger asteroids (140 meters) that could actually pose a threat to Earth, but their equipment also tracks smaller ones.
"It's really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close because we can see the Earth's gravity dramatically bends its trajectory," said Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA.
According to the JPL's calculations, the asteroid turned by about 45 degrees due to Earth's gravitational pull.
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