SUV-sized asteroid becomes closest to pass Earth: NASA

WASHINGTON: The Earth avoided a doomsday after an asteroid the size of an SUV passed 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above it making it the closest asteroid ever observed passing by our planet.

The asteroid named 2020 QG would likely not have caused any damage, instead of dissolving in the atmosphere, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.

The asteroid, which was about 10 to 20 feet (three to six meters) long, passed above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday.

It was moving at nearly eight miles per second (12.3 kilometers per second), well below the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles at which most telecommunication satellites fly.

The asteroid was first recorded six hours after its approach by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, as a long trail of light in the sky. The US space agency said that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a similar distance a few times per year.

However, they are difficult to record, unless they’re heading directly towards the planet, in which case the explosion in the atmosphere is usually noticed as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when the explosion of an object about 66 feet long shattered windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.