On Friday the 13th, an asteroid the size of a house touched Earth at 250 miles

Sacred space swings, Batman!

As everyone looked over Earth’s collective shoulder at the asteroid that was potentially about to overtake us the day before Election Day, a completely different one came towards us through our blind spot: the direction of the sun.

It passed just 239 miles or so from Earth, skimming the top of our atmosphere – Friday the 13th.

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An asteroid near the Earth.

An asteroid near the Earth.

And no one noticed until the next day, when 15 hours later it was detected by the Last Alert System survey on the Earth impact of asteroids at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

The first day of the election was the size of a refrigerator, as astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said at the time when raising the alarm. But in the end that barely dented Earth’s orbit, let alone our atmosphere.

Asteroid 2020 VT4 is another story. An estimated diameter of 16-32 feet, “about the size of a small house,” according to Universe Today, has set a record for the “closest documented non-meteoric asteroid passage against Earth.”

Traveling at 30,014 miles per hour, it overtook us in the South Pacific at 12:20 pm New York time last Friday, EarthSky.org reported.

The newly discovered asteroid A10sHcN approached Earth yesterday, passing only a few hundred miles above the South Pacific Ocean. This encounter shortened its orbit, ensuring that this Earth cruiser will make more frequent approaches. pic.twitter.com/XrnKiiGTyJ

– Tony Dunn (@ tony873004) November 14, 2020

This is roughly the same height, be it a few miles, that the International Space Station orbits above the Earth. However, there was nothing even close to a collision there.

“Space is so large – and the space station and the asteroid are both so relatively small – that it would be extremely unlikely that an asteroid of this size would collide with the space laboratory,” EarthSky said.

Additionally, the ISS was over the South Atlantic at the time, Universe Today said.

Other record-breaking asteroid approaches this year have been more than a thousand miles away, making 2020 VT4 a much closer call.

However, astronomers agree that even if he had arrived between 50 and 70 miles above the Earth’s surface, where most of these space rocks break up, he would have done nothing but disintegrate, although it would have been an impressive meteor even in general daylight, EarthSky noted.

While the Earth remained unharmed, if in the dark, the same cannot be said for 2020 VT4.

“This shift actually substantially altered the orbit of 2020 VT4,” Universe Today noted, changing its 549-day (about 1.5 years) orbit around the sun to 315 days (about 10 months), and even changing its classification of asteroids, as it is now within the orbit of Venus.