Asteroid Comes Within Moon's Orbit and Skims Past Earth

A small, bus-sized asteroid passed within 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) of Earth - closer than the Moon - on Saturday morning, but posed no threat to our planet, Space.com reported.

The newly detected asteroid, named HL129, was about 7.6 meters wide (25 feet), according to NASA's Asteroid Watch project based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It made its closest approach to Earth at 4.13 a.m. EDT (8.13 a.m. GMT) on Saturday.

Although to the untrained eye it may seem like a far away distance, the asteroid travelled within the Moon's orbit, which on average is 238,855 miles (384,399 kilometers) away from the Earth.

Astronomers from the Mount Lemmon Survey team first discovered the rock on Wednesday, according to an alert by Minor Plant Center, which is part of the International Astronomical Union.

NASA scientists and researchers constantly monitor the sky for hints of threatening asteroids. According to the Daily Mail, the Earth is up to 10 times more vulnerable to asteroid collisions than previously thought, and so far we have nothing but "blind luck" to thank for the lack of incidents.

"While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially-operated observatories," former astronaut Ed Lu told Wired.co.uk earlier this year. "Because we don't know where or when the next major impact will occur, the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid has been blind luck."

However, most asteroid impacts occur too high up in the atmosphere to cause any real damage on the ground, and many hit over the unpopulated Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

Occasionally, asteroids do strike land. The Chelyabinsk meteorite that disintegrated above Russia in 2013 and injured hundreds of people was a cold reminder.

The B612 Foundation's Sentinel Space Telescope Mission aims to be our first line of defense in preventing such future catastrophes.