Image copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR Image caption This composite of 30 images of asteroid 2014 JO25 was generated using Nasa's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California's Mojave Desert

A large asteroid the size of the Rock of Gibraltar has passed safely by Earth.

The object, measured to be almost a kilometre wide, came within five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Known as 2014 JO25, the asteroid is the biggest such space rock to skim our world since 2004.

Astronomers say the best opportunity to view the rock will come in the dark hours of Wednesday night.

Radar imagery using Nasa's 70m (230 ft) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California reveal a peanut-shaped asteroid that rotates about once every five hours.

The asteroid passed Earth at a distance of 1.8 million km (1.1 million miles) at 13:24 BST on Wednesday, 19 April.

The next known encounter of an asteroid of about this size will occur in 2027 when the 800m-wide (half-mile-wide) asteroid 1999 AN10 will fly by at one lunar distance, about 380,000 km (236,000 miles). </s> The 360ft asteroid, named 2018 GE3, flew within 119,000 miles (192,000 km) of the planet with little warning over the weekend.

 

 Asteroid 2018 GE3 was observed by US-based astronomers The Catalina Sky Survey and Steward Observatory in the early hours of Saturday morning.

 

 Within the next 24 hours, the space rock flew perilously close to Earth, passing at around half the distance between the planet and the moon.

 

 2018 GE3 was one of the largest asteroids, whose measurements exceeded the length of a football pitch, to have ever flown that close to Earth.

The meteor was even bigger than the 50ft-wide asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, injuring hundreds.

 

 Only two near-Earth asteroids monitored were larger, one in 2001 and one in 2002, according to NASA records.

 

 SpaceX engineer Andrew Radar tweeted: “Asteroid 2018 GE3 flew past us today, half the distance to the Moon.

 

 “Around 50-100 m in diameter, it was several times the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, around the size of the 1908 Tunguska event – easily enough to destroy a city.

 

 “We had less than a day's warning.”

“We had less than a day's warning” To date, astronomers have spotted more than 8,000 near-Earth asteroids that are at least 140 meters wide – big enough to wipe out an entire US state.

 

 A near-Earth object (NEO) is anything that comes within about 30 million miles of our planet's orbit.

 

 One 1,500ft-wide asteroid named Bennu, the most dangerous asteroid on the planetary science watch list, is expected to closely approach Earth, but not impact it, in 2135. 

 

 If it were to strike Earth, the force of the collision would be equal to 80,000 uranium gun-type bombs – the kind of atomic bomb that was used on Hiroshima in August 1945 and killed an estimated 150,000 people.

 

 Congress tasked NASA with spotting 90% of all NEOs bigger than 460 feet by 2020. </s> Skyscraper-sizied asteroid VR12, 287 meters long, is nearing our Earth with every passing second as the terrifying combination of space rock, ice and metal speeds through the our Solar System. VR12 is one of 1,882 asteroids that NASA describes as 'potentially hazardous’ as it makes its approach to the planet at speeds of 6.3 kilometers per second, or 22,680 kmh within 3.8 Lunar Distances of our planet, where one LD is the average distance between Earth and the Moon. Astronomers expect the asteroid from the depths of space to skim past the planet tomorrow, March 7 around 7.53 am EST . NASA expects the asteroid to approach Earth within 0.09 AU, or 1,346,380 km.

NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) astronomers categories “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) as space rocks bigger than 100 meters in diameter, which run the risk of coming closer to Earth than 0.05 AU, or 7,479,894 kilometers.



NASA: “Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles. About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface. Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area. Only once every few million years, an object large enough to threaten Earth's civilisation comes along. Impact craters on Earth, the moon and other planetary bodies are evidence of these occurrences.”

The first asteroid was Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system. Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.





Sixty Five million years ago, the most famous asteroid in history slammed into Earth and most likely exterminated the dinosaurs. Disconcertingly, we are no less likely to be to hit by an asteroid today than our ancient reptilian counterparts were — but luckily we have helpful tools at our disposal.

The impact occurred 65 million years ago when an asteroid approximately 12 kilometers (7 miles) wide slammed into Earth. The collision took place near what is now the Yucatán peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. The asteroid is often cited as a potential cause of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction that erased up to 75 percent of all plant and animal species.



A 100-meter asteroid (with the same composition and speed as the 10-meter asteroid) would release 1000 Hiroshimas. An asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would do much greater damage, and an asteroid of 10 kilometers would be like the one that killed off the dinosaurs. It would sterilize an entire continent and cause major global damage.

On average, one of these huge 10-kilometer asteroids strikes Earth every 50 million years, and the last one was 65 million years ago — meaning we are now overdue. We know about most asteroids of this size in the Solar System – we’ve studied their orbits, their characteristics, and we can predict their chance of impact. But as the asteroids get smaller, the less we know of them.

The ESO team estimates that about 70–80% of asteroids from 500 meters to 1 kilometers in diameter are known, but only about 10% of asteroids 100 meters in diameter are known. The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) is working to improve these numbers.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and ESO

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"Stop Saying That Dinosaurs Went Extinct. They Didn't" </s> A small asteroid — which had just been discovered earlier in the day — disintegrated over Africa on Saturday, NASA said.

The tiny space rock, roughly six feet long, entered Earth’s atmosphere at the high speed of 38,000 mph and broke apart several miles above the surface, creating a bright fireball that lit up the evening sky, the agency said.

The event was witnessed by a number of observers and was caught on webcam video.

The object surprised astronomers shortly after its discovery, when its trajectory suggested it would pass very, very close to Earth just hours later, according to EarthSky.org.

When it was spotted, astronomers realized there was a possibility of an Earth impact. However, the asteroid was determined to be very small and therefore harmless.

“This was a much smaller object than we are tasked to detect and warn about,” said Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer at NASA Headquarters. “However, this real-world event allows us to exercise our capabilities and gives some confidence our impact prediction models are adequate to respond to the potential impact of a larger object.”

The object was first given the temporary designation of ZLAF9B2, but has now been renamed as asteroid 2018 LA by the International Astronomical Union.

It was much smaller than the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013, which was an estimated 60 feet wide. That meteor broke windows in six Russian cities and caused more than 1,500 people to seek medical attention, mostly due to injuries from flying glass, EarthSky said.

These are the discovery observations of asteroid 2018 LA from the Catalina Sky Survey, taken June 2, 2018. About eight hours after these images were taken, the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphereand disintegrated in the upper atmosphere near Botswana, Africa. </s> A newly discovered asteroid that will fly safely past Earth today (Feb. 9) may be larger than a celestial object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, five years ago. The newly found interloper, called 2018 CB, is estimated to be from 50 to 130 feet in diameter, and will fly by Earth at about 2:30 p.m. PST (5:30 p.m. EST).

"Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet — maybe only once or twice a year," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a statement from the agency.

2018 CB is a small asteroid by celestial standards; the largest asteroid in our solar system, Vesta, is roughly 326 miles across. (Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt at 590 miles across — roughly the size of Texas. It is sometimes referred to as an asteroid.)

But as residents of Chelyabinsk found out in 2013, something 2018 CB's size can cause a lot of damage. That year, an object roughly 51 feet in diameter exploded above the town while hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, shattering glass and causing hundreds of injuries.

The NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey spotted 2018 CB and another asteroid, 2018 CC, on Feb. 4. While 2018 CB isn't entering Earth's atmosphere, the object will whiz by safely at less than 20 percent of the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Coincidentally, 2018 CB's arrival comes just days after two other asteroids safely passed by Earth. On Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 4), asteroid 2002 AJ129 came by the planet at a distance of only 2.6 million miles — 10 times the distance to the moon. (The average distance between the Earth and moon is about 238,855 miles, or 384,400 km.)

Then, on Tuesday (Feb. 6), asteroid 2018 CC made its closest approach, at 114,000 miles, roughly the halfway point between Earth and the moon. Astronomers, however, have known about this asteroid since 2002. It measures from 0.3 miles to 0.75 miles across.

NASA and its Planetary Defense Coordination Office regularly search for and track asteroids using several partner telescopes. The goal is to catalog all near-Earth objects that could pose a threat to the planet. Right now, the agency hasn't announced the detection of any imminent threats. It publishes all its asteroid findings online at the Small-Body Database Browser, which is freely available online.

There are also several asteroid missions in space that are ongoing, or coming up soon, designed to gain more information about how asteroids are formed and where they are located.

NASA's dedicated asteroid-hunting telescope, NEOWISE, will conclude its mission this year when its orbit brings the insturment into a zone with too much sunlight for observations. The agency's OSIRIS-ReX — and Japan's Hayabusa 2 — are on their way to different asteroids to pick up samples for later analysis back at Earth. Two new NASA missions, called Lucy and Psyche, will fly past eight asteroids in the 2020s and 2030s.

NASA is in an ongoing quest to catalog 90 percent of asteroids that are larger than 460 feet wide and that will come to within about 4.65 million miles of Earth, or about 20 times the distance from Earth to the moon, according to the agency. In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with completing this work by 2020, but multiple reports suggest that the agency will miss that deadline. NASA did, however, meet Congress' goal of finding 90 percent of all Near Earth Objects (NEO's) that are 0.6 miles wide in 2010.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. </s> A small asteroid discovered Saturday morning, determined to head for Earth, impacted the planet's atmosphere just a few hours later, according to NASA.

The cosmic boulder, named asteroid 2018 LA (and previously listed as ZLAF9B2), was estimated to be only about 6 feet (2 meters) across. It was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.

"The discovery of asteroid 2018 LA is only the third time that an asteroid has been discovered to be on an impact trajectory," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), in a statement. "It is also only the second time that the impact location was predicted well ahead of the event itself."

All three asteroids burned up in the atmosphere and caused no reported damage.

NEO watchers calculated that asteroid 2018 LA would enter the atmosphere somewhere over a corridor extending from Africa across the Indian Ocean to Papua New Guinea.

The final moments of the asteroid's existence appear to have been caught Saturday evening from a webcam in South Africa in the below clip. Although it looks like the fireball impacts the ground, it is really just disappearing over the horizon. NASA says it disintegrated several miles over the surface as it lit up the sky.

"This was a much smaller object than we are tasked to detect and warn about," said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters. "However, this real-world event allows us to exercise our capabilities and gives some confidence our impact prediction models are adequate to respond to the potential impact of a larger object."

One such larger object was the asteroid that went completely undetected until it collided with the atmosphere over Russia in 2013, creating a shock wave that blew out thousands of windows in the town of Chelyabinsk, causing a number of minor injuries.

How much it's worth freaking out over these undetected or late-detected asteroids is up for debate. The smallest asteroids like 2018 LA are the hardest to spot, but also the least likely to do any damage. That said, it can never hurt to have more telescopes and eyes pointed at the sky looking for the next space rock aiming to knock on our door ... or break it down.

Solving for XX: The tech industry seeks to overcome outdated ideas about "women in tech." </s> I got this notice in email from NASA about a surprise asteroid that gave us only one day of warning passing halfway between the Earth and the moon. It was the largest known asteroid to ever pass that close to Earth in observational history.SURPRISE ASTEROID FLYBY: With little warning, on Sunday, April 15th,2018 GE3 was discovered just the day before as it plunged inward from the asteroid belt. A quick-thinking amateur astronomer in Europe was able to record a video of the asteroid as it flew by.With little warning, a relatively large asteroid flew through the Earth-Moon system on April 15th only 192,200 km (0.5 Lunar Distance) from our planet. 2018 GE3 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey approaching Earth on April 14th. Hours later, amateur astronomer Michael Jäger of Weißenkirchen Austria video-recorded the space rock rushing through the southern constellation Serpens:According to Wikipedia , 2018 GE3 is the largest known asteroid to pass that close to Earth in observational history," says Jäger. "It was shining like a 13th magnitude star at the time of my observations."This puts it into the same class as the 60-meter Tunguska impactor that leveled a forest in Siberia in 1908. A more recent point of comparison is the Chelyabinsk meteor-a ~20-meter asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013, shattering windows and toppling onlookers as a fireball brighter than the sun blossomed in the blue morning Ural sky. 2018 GE3 could be 5 to 6 times wider than that object.Based on an observational arc of only 1 day, 2018 GE3 appears to follow an elliptical orbit which stretches from the asteroid belt to deep inside the inner solar system. Every ~2.5 years the space rock crosses the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars - although not necessarily making close approaches to the planets themselves.NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has made an interactive orbit viewer available online here </s> A huge asteroid bigger than one of Britain’s most famous landmarks sped past Earth early this morning.

The gigantic space rock is called 2016 NF23 and was travelling at 20,000 miles per hour – which is about 15 times as fast as Concorde – when it reached the closest point of its approach just before 4am.

Nasa said the object is up to 160 metres wide, meaning it could be bigger than St. Paul’s Cathedral, which stands 111 metres high and was the tallest building in London until 1967.

It came within 3 million miles of us, which is close enough to be considered ‘potentially hazardous’.

If the rock were ever to Earth, it would destroy an entire city and kill millions.

Luckily, it’s not believed to be on a collision course with our planet so is unlikely to do us any damage at any point in the future.

Lindley Johnson, a planetary defence officer at Nasa, told Space.com: ‘This object is merely designated a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) because its orbit over time wings it within five million miles of Earth’s orbit, but there is nothing hazardous to Earth or even unique about this pass of the asteroid.’

Humanity doesn’t need to fear gigantic asteroids big enough to wipe us off the face of the Earth, because they are easy to track due to their enormous size.

But we should be very afraid of smaller ‘stealth asteroids’ which are big enough to wipe out a city and extremely difficult to detect.

The European Space Agency believes astronomers have spotted just 1 in 100 space rocks which are 1km wide or less.

Nasa figures reveal that roughly 4,300 space rocks of between 100 metres and 1 kilometre have been spotted to date.

If ESA’s predictions are correct, it could mean there are actually 430,000 asteroids out there and we’ve no idea where most of them are or whether they are on a collision course with our planet.

Detlef Koschny, head of the ESA near-Earth objects team, said that even small objects could do major damage.

‘If a 100-metre asteroid hit Earth, it would cause significant damage in an area the size of Germany, and even affect the surrounding region. But asteroids of this size don’t strike Earth very often. Maybe every 10,000 years on average,’ he told Space Daily.

‘Going from 100 metres down to 50 metres, the statistical frequency of strikes increases to once every 1,000 years. A century ago in 1908, a 40-metre object struck the Earth over Tunguska, Siberia, destroying an area of forest the size of the Munich metro area.

‘And then if we go down to asteroid sizes around 20 metres – like the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, which ended up injuring 1,500 people – these occur on average once every 10 to 100 years. We will definitely see something like that again in our lifetime.’

Earlier this year, Nasa warned of a ‘vulnerability’ in Earth’s defences which means there is only a ‘limited’ chance of spotting asteroids coming from a certain direction in space.

Koschny backed up this warning, saying smaller objects are often only spotted when they pass the moon.

If a large asteroid was spotted this late, it may not give governments enough time to evacuate any cities in the firing line.

MORE: The Milky Way died a long time ago and we’re living through its Second Coming </s> An asteroid the size of a football field buzzed by Earth Sunday in one of the closest encounters the planet has seen in a while.

At its closest point, the asteroid – called 2018 GE3 – was just 119,500 miles away from Earth's atmosphere, about half the distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The estimated diameter of the space rock ranged from 131 to 328 feet, CNEOS reports.

That's nothing compared to asteroids that make up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which can measure to about 580 miles across, NASA explains on its website. Those asteroids, however, pose no threat to Earth.

The 2018 GE3 asteroid was discovered just one day before it skimmed past Earth in what scientists are calling a "surprise" flyby.

"2018 GE3 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey approaching Earth on April 14th. Hours later, amateur astronomer Michael Jäger of Weißenkirchen Austria video-recorded the space rock gliding through the southern constellation Serpens," Spaceweather.com reported.

WHY NASA IS SENDING A SPACECRAFT TO A METAL ASTEROID CALLED 'PSYCHE'

The asteroid that flew by Earth Sunday was up to six times the size of the meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains in Chelyabinsk back in February 2013.

That meteor – estimated to be about 10 tons and 49 feet wide – entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph and shattered into pieces about 18-32 miles above the ground, injuring 1,100 people (mostly from flying glass), the Russian Academy of Sciences confirmed.

"It doesn’t take a very large object. A 10-meter size object already packs the same energy as a nuclear bomb," Andrew Cheng, who led a 2000-2001 mission for NASA to orbit and land on an asteroid, told Fox News at the time.

The April asteroid, however, traveling at a speed of about 66,000 miles per hour, would have likely broken down "due to friction with the air" as soon as it entered Earth's atmosphere, EarthSky reported.

MINING FOR ASTEROIDS WILL BE THE NEXT GOLD RUSH

"However, some of an asteroid this size might have gotten through to Earth’s surface, and an asteroid this big is capable of causing some regional damage, depending on various factors such as composition, speed, entry angle, and location of impact," the space website explains. "It might make you feel better (or worse) to know that asteroids enter Earth’s atmosphere unnoticed on a fairly regular basis."

NASA tracks asteroids that make close approaches to Earth, providing data on the distance and estimated diameter of each object. At least three other small space rocks are set to fly past Earth on Tuesday – with the largest measuring 111 feet around.

That's significantly smaller than the 2018 GE3 asteroid.

"A preliminary analysis of the orbit of 2018 GE shows this is the closest this particular space rock has come to Earth at least since 1930," EarthSky reports.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The asteroid 6478 Gault, 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) in diameter, is found to have been impacted by another large (>500 metres (>0.31 miles)) asteroid in late October 2018, the largest asteroid-to-asteroid collision in recorded history.