An asteroid the size of an SUV travels 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the earth, the closest asteroid ever seen through our planet, NASA said Tuesday.
If it had been on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid – named 2020 QG – would probably not have caused any damage, instead disintegrating into the atmosphere, making a fireball in the air, like a meteor, the Jet Propulsion NASA Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
The asteroid, which was about 10 to 20 feet (three to six meters) long, went above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 0408 GMT.
It traveled at almost eight miles per second (12.3 kilometers per second), well below the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles where most telecommunications 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 asteroids of similar size run through Earth several times a year.
But they are difficult to pick up unless they are traveling directly towards the planet, in which case the explosion in the atmosphere is normally noticed – as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when the explosion of an object over 66 feet long broken windows for miles, injured thousands.
One of NASA’s missions is to control larger asteroids (460 feet) that may actually pose a threat to Earth, but also track their equipment smaller.
“It’s very cool to see a small asteroid through this close up, because we can dramatically bend the Earth’s gravitational pull its trajectory,” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA.
According to JPL calculations, the asteroid rotated about 45 degrees due to the earth’s gravity.
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