The asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 AX8, made a so-called “Earth Close Approach” on Tuesday morning, January 22. NASA’s scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, estimate AX8 flew by around 3.35am GMT (UTC). The asteroid’s flyby comes just 14 days after the JPL first observed the space rock on January 8. NASA last tracked Asteroid AX8 on January 11, just 10 days before it approached our home world.
According to the JPL, the imposing space rock measures somewhere in the range of 91.8ft to 206.7ft (28m to 63m) in diameter.
An asteroid this big is nearly half-as-tall as The Great Pyramid of Giza and is seven-times longer than a London double-decker bus.
At the lower end of the estimate, Asteroid AX8 is seven-times longer than a Volkswagen Beetle car and is 14-times longer than a Queen Size bed.
Asteroids this big can be incredibly dangerous if their trajectories cross paths directly with the Earth’s orbit.
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A significantly smaller asteroid caused widespread chaos and destruction in 2013 when it entered the atmosphere undetected and exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia.
The so-called Chelyabinsk meteor injured more than 1,500 people and damaged more than 7,000 buildings with the force of its eruption.
The asteroid was estimated to only measure around 65.6ft (20m) or less in diameter.
In the aftermath of the meteor attack, NASA dubbed the event a “cosmic wake-up call” to the dangers of rogue asteroids headed for Earth.
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NASA said: “Several thousand meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere each day.
“The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight.
“Those that occur at night also are rarely noticed by people. Due to the combination of all of these factors, only a handful of witnessed meteorite falls occur each year.”
Thankfully, Asteroid AX8 missed the planet entirely today by more than four million miles.
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At its closest, the asteroid approached the Earth from 0.04630 astronomical units (au) or 18.02 Lunar Distances (LD).
One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun and measures approximately 93 million miles (149.6 million km).
Asteroid AX8 cut this distance down today to just 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km).
This is the equivalent of 18.02-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
After the asteroid safely passed our planet, NASA asteroid trackers do not expect another Earth Close Approach anytime in the foreseeable future.