A three to six meter-long asteroid passed 2,950 kilometers above Earth on Sunday, the closest asteroid ever observed passing by our planet, NASA said.
If it had been on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid named "2020 QG" would likely not have caused any damage, instead disintegrating in the atmosphere, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
According to AFP, the asteroid, passed above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 04:08 GMT. It was moving at nearly 12.3 kilometers per second, well below the geostationary orbit of about 36,000 kilometers 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.
NASA said that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a similar distance a few times per year, but they're difficult to record, unless they're heading directly towards the planet.
The explosion in the atmosphere is usually noticed, as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when the explosion of an object about 20 meter long shattered windows for kilometers, injuring a thousand people.
"It's really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, because we can see the Earth's gravity dramatically bends its trajectory," said Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA.
According to the NASA JPL's calculations, the asteroid turned by about 45 degrees due to Earth's gravitational pull.
