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A small asteroid narrowly missed Earth just hours after the car-sized rock was discovered flying in space.
The asteroid, dubbed 2021 RS2, approached within 9,532 miles of the Earth’s surface on Tuesday. The near call was slightly farther away than Earth’s diameter, 7,917.5 miles, according to EarthSky.
RS2 was first observed by researchers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona on September 7 as it headed toward Earth at 39,366 miles per hour.
Had the asteroid come a little closer, it would have largely disintegrated by being consumed in the atmosphere and posed no real threat to the planet.
This is the closest flyby of the year and the 21st closest on record, sharing space with the 2021 CZ3 which passed us on February 9, 2021.
According to The Watchers website, RS2 is the 81st known asteroid to fly at lunar distance [239,228.3 miles] from Earth since the start of 2021.
In the event that an asteroid ever threatens Earth’s existence, NASA has made a contingency plan to launch a spacecraft directly at the rock.
“Until now, we didn’t have too many options for what we could do if we found something to come up,” Johns Hopkins planetary astronomer Andy Rivkin told Vice News of the Double Asteroid Redirection mission. NASA test (DART) in April. “DART is the first test of how we might be able to deflect something without having to resort to a nuclear package or sitting in our basements, waiting and crossing our fingers. “
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