On May 3rd, an asteroid around the size of a bus passed by closer to Earth than the orbit of the Moon. Although there are international teams of scientists and researchers constantly monitoring the sky for asteroid activity, astronomers at the Mt. Lemmon Survey team had only discovered the asteroid, called 2014 HL129, a few days before it passed by our planet.
On May 3rd, an asteroid around the size of a bus passed by closer to Earth than the orbit of the Moon.
Although there are international teams of scientists and researchers constantly monitoring the sky for such activity, astronomers at the Mt. Lemmon Survey team had only discovered the asteroid, called 2014 HL129, a few days before it passed by our planet.
NASA's Asteroid Watch project based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California measured it to be around 25 feet wide.
According to estimates from NASA, a mere one percent of the asteroids in our solar system have been located.
So researchers have created a map that shows the orbit path of more than 14 hundred potentially hazardous asteroids.
NASA officials are quoted as saying: “These are the asteroids considered hazardous because they are fairly large, at least 460 feet or 140 meters in size. And because they follow orbits that pass close to the Earth's orbit, within 4.7 million miles or 7.5 million kilometers.”
The 2014 HL129 asteroid never posed any threat to our planet, but it flew by at a distance of about 186 thousand miles away.
