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A low-flying asteroid only missed Earth by a few hundred miles on Friday the 13th and was not noticed until the next day.
The asteroid, named 2020 VT4, was identified 15 hours later by the Last Alert System asteroid impact Earth survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
It passed our planet less than 400 kilometers (240 miles) away, which is roughly the same distance as the International Space Station orbits the Earth.
As such, asteroid 2020 VT4 sets the record for Earth’s closest recorded non-meteorological asteroid passage.
It was about twenty feet in diameter and flew over the South Pacific Ocean. His encounter with Earth “shortened its orbit, ensuring that this Earth cruiser will make more frequent close approaches,” Tony Dunn, who runs the Orbit Simulator website, tweeted.
If the asteroid had blocked Earth, it would have burned in its atmosphere leaving a meteor trail behind. NASA says it would take an asteroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than a kilometer to do local damage to Earth.
However, an adteroid larger than a kilometer or two could have worldwide effects.
The record for an asteroid passing close to Earth has already been broken once this year.
Asteroid 2020 HQ arrived on Sunday just 1,830 miles above the southern Indian Ocean, according to Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic camera that scans the sky for space phenomena.
That asteroid was also particularly small: roughly three to six meters in diameter, which is about the size of a large machine.
An object of that size passes close to Earth about every year, but identifying them is difficult. Space agencies like NASA need to track these objects in case they get close enough to endanger Earth.
Asteroid 2020 VT4 is also not the only space debris to pass close to Earth on a particularly unfortunate day.
An asteroid, called Apophis, is about 300 meters in size which makes it comparable to the Eiffel Tower.
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