An asteroid the size of an SUV handed 1,830 kilometers (2,950 km ) above Earth, the nearest asteroid ever detected passing by our world, NASA said Tuesday.
If it was on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid -- called 2020 QG -- would likely not have caused any harm, rather disintegrating in the air, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
The asteroid, which was about 10 to 20 ft (three to six meters) long, passed over the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 0408 GMT.
It had been moving at almost eight kilometers per second (12.3 km per second), well under the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles at which most telecommunication satellites soar.
The asteroid was initially recorded six hours after its approach from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, as a lengthy path of light in the sky.
The US space agency stated that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a similar distance several times each year.
But they're difficult to capture, unless they are heading directly towards the planet, in the event the explosion in the air is generally noticed -- like in Chelyabinsk, Russia at 2013, when the explosion of an object about 66 feet long shattered windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.
Among NASA's missions is to track bigger asteroids (460 feet) that might actually pose a danger to Earth, but their equipment also monitors smaller ones.
"It's really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, since we can observe the Earth's gravity dramatically bends its trajectory," said Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Research at NASA.
According to this JPL's calculations, the asteroid switched by about 45 degrees because of Earth's gravitational pull.
If it was on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid -- called 2020 QG -- would likely not have caused any harm, rather disintegrating in the air, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
The asteroid, which was about 10 to 20 ft (three to six meters) long, passed over the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 0408 GMT.
It had been moving at almost eight kilometers per second (12.3 km per second), well under the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles at which most telecommunication satellites soar.
The asteroid was initially recorded six hours after its approach from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, as a lengthy path of light in the sky.
The US space agency stated that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a similar distance several times each year.
But they're difficult to capture, unless they are heading directly towards the planet, in the event the explosion in the air is generally noticed -- like in Chelyabinsk, Russia at 2013, when the explosion of an object about 66 feet long shattered windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.
Among NASA's missions is to track bigger asteroids (460 feet) that might actually pose a danger to Earth, but their equipment also monitors smaller ones.
"It's really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, since we can observe the Earth's gravity dramatically bends its trajectory," said Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Research at NASA.
According to this JPL's calculations, the asteroid switched by about 45 degrees because of Earth's gravitational pull.