A huge asteroid roughly the size of an F-150 pickup truck reportedly came within 300 miles of Earth on Nov. 13.
The distance is a new record for how close an asteroid has come to Earth, according Fox News. The asteroid was not considered a “potentially hazardous” Near Earth Object (NEO) due to its size, the outlet reported.
Pickup truck-sized asteroid came less than 300 miles from hitting Earth https://t.co/mlYbtz2MvY pic.twitter.com/zsenEEyjEX
— New York Post (@nypost) November 17, 2020
“Potentially hazardous” asteroids must be more than 460 feet in diameter, according to NASA. The asteroid that came within 240 miles of Earth on Nov. 13 was somewhere between 16 and 32 feet wide, according to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. (RELATED: Scientists Have Predicted When Earth Will Be Hit By An Extinction-Level Asteroid)
I know it probably wasn’t going to hit us, but 240 miles is not very far. It is far in some ways, but when you think about an object traveling through space, I feel like it becomes less far. It wouldn’t take long for something traveling through space to close a distance of 240 miles.
There was another asteroid that came with 2,000 miles of Earth back in August. That asteroid held the record at the time for closest NEO to Earth. The asteroid was not spotted before the distance was recorded, but NASA claimed it would not have done damage to Earth if it had made contact, according to Fox News.