An asteroid roughly 64 to 140 meters wide — about the size of a city block — zipped past the Earth today, and you can watch a video of the event taken from the Slooh Space Camera .
The asteroid, officially called 2013 ET, was discovered only on Mar. 3. It came within less than 1 million km of our planet, about 2.5 times the distance between the moon and the Earth. This distance means the object poses no danger but is a very close shave astronomically speaking.
The asteroid’s close approach barely a week after its discovery follows a busy month for things falling from the sky. On Feb. 15, the largest meteor to hit the Earth in a century exploded over Russia just as another asteroid made a record-setting close approach. With the world’s attention fixing more and more on space rocks, this flyby highlights how big and potentially deadly objects can appear without our noticing.
Slooh tracked 2013 ET from a telescope in the Canary Islands and also has captured some early video of the asteroid, which can be seen at this link.
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