NASA said an asteroid the size of a bus passed by Earth safely Tuesday. It was livestreamed in the video embedded below or on the website of the Virtual Telescope Project.
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NASA Says Asteroid 2022 HB1 Made a Safe Close Approach
Under the designation 2022 HB1, the object has been added to NASA's "Close Approaches" database.
According to The Sun, the astronomers from the Virtual Telescope Project captured it ahead of its approach on April 26 at 5:52 p.m. EST.
Space agencies consider any item approaching within 4.65 million miles of "possibly harmful."
But reports said potentially harmful space objects have a minimum Earth orbit crossing distance of 0.05 AU or less and a magnitude of 22 or greater in absolute terms (over 140 m).
Smaller objects, according to researchers, are not capable of causing enormous harm when they crash on Earth.
According to NASA, the 2022 HB1 spacecraft will be up to 12 meters (39 feet) long. It will approach Earth at 200,000 kilometers, almost half the distance between our planet and the Moon.
In terms of space, that's a fairly close call. However, there was no indication that the asteroid would impact the planet. Even if it collided with Earth, the space rock would pose no hazard since it was tiny enough to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
Asteroid 2022 HB1 was found on April 24, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimates it to be around 12 meters in diameter, roughly the size of a bus.
The minimum distance the object would reach Earth, according to the experts, was 0.00134 AU. The distance is roughly 200,461 kilometers.
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How to Watch Flyby
The flyby was streamed live on the Virtual Telescope Project's website starting at 2:30 p.m. EST.
2022 HB1 is only one of a half-dozen asteroids anticipated to pass near Earth this week.
Fortunately, none of the asteroids that NASA is tracking will pose a threat to humanity.
Astronomers are presently watching 2,000 asteroids, comets, and other objects, with new ones being detected every day.
Since the asteroid that wiped off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, Earth hasn't witnessed an asteroid of this magnitude.
Smaller things capable of leveling an entire city, on the other hand, collide with Earth regularly.
On June 30, 1908, one a few hundred meters across devastated an 800-square-mile forest near Tunguska, Siberia.
Fortunately, NASA believes that none of the NEOs it monitors are on a crash course with Earth.
However, the space agency often revises the expected trajectories of objects, so this might alter in the next months or years.
"NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small," the space agency said on its website.
"In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years," NASA added.
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