Newly discovered asteroid passed between Earth and Moon in close encounter

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An aasteroid that was solely discovered final week passed between the Earth and the Moon in a close, however protected, encounter on Monday.

The small car-sized area rock, dubbed 2024 CY1, passed by at practically a 3rd of the space between the Earth and the Moon – also called 1 lunar distance.

It made the close method at about 121,000km, passing by the planet round 7.24GMT, in accordance with the Virtual Telescope Project.

Measuring solely about 4 to 8m in diameter (12 to 30ft), specialists stated it didn’t pose any danger to Earth.

The discovery marks the tenth time this yr that an asteroid has been noticed by astronomers flying previous Earth inside 1 lunar distance.

It can be the third to occur in February up to now.

Last month astronomers detected an asteroid zooming towards the Earth solely hours earlier than it entered the planet’s ambiance.

The area rock, named 2024 BXI, burned up in the skies above Berlin right into a innocent fireball, and it was solely the eighth time an asteroid was noticed simply earlier than it hit the Earth.

Fragments of the rock had been additionally recovered round Berlin by area fanatics.

Earlier this yr, an asteroid in regards to the dimension of a skyscraper safely zoomed previous the Earth at about 1.7 million miles away.

While the rock was categorized as “potentially hazardous” resulting from its dimension, it passed by a lot farther away at about 7 instances the space between the planet and the Moon.

So far astronomers have discovered about 25,000 asteroids with the potential to not less than wipe out a whole metropolis.

The European Space Agency, nonetheless, suspects there might be one million asteroids in the identical dimension vary of 30 to 100m close to Earth with practically 99 per cent of them nonetheless remaining undiscovered.

Space businesses and governments the world over have been working to identify such doubtlessly hazardous objects and develop methods to guard the Earth from them.

For occasion, ESA’s Neomir is an orbiting observatory being developed for launch round 2030 to circle between the Sun and the Earth and work as an early warning system for asteroids.