Earth has near-miss with small asteroid

Earth has near-miss with small asteroid

Asteroid was about the size of a city bus, but posed no threat to Earth

If you had a particularly late night this past Friday, you may have felt an inexplicable gust of wind in the wee hours of Saturday morning. That’s because Earth was buzzed by a bus-sized asteroid at about 4:13 AM, which came closer to our surface than even the moon.

Of course, you wouldn’t have actually felt anything, and NASA says the asteroid posed no threat to Earth. Asteroid 2014 HL129, which was only discovered on April 28, is about 25 feet wide. It came within 186,000 miles of Earth’s surface, putting it squarely between our orbit and the moon’s. For reference, the moon is typically 238,855 miles away from Earth, on average.

The Minor Planet Center, an arm of the International Astronomical Union, issued an alert announcing the discovery of 2014 HL129 on April 29, the day after its discovery. According to their website, they are “the single worldwide location for receipt and distribution of positional measurements of minor planets, comets and outer irregular natural satellites of the major planets. The MPC is responsible for the identification, designation and orbit computation for all of these objects.”

They’ve already discovered 419 near-Earth objects this year, with two coming in the month of May alone. According to former astronaut Ed Lu, Earth is apparently playing with house money when it comes to avoiding an asteroid collision.

“While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially-operated observatories,” he said in an interview with Wired UK.

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