An asteroid almost a kilometre wide has passed our planet at 12:24 GMT on Wednesday, 19 April. The asteroid called 2014 JO25 is the biggest to pass our planet since 2004.
“The asteroid has a contact binary structure – two lobes connected by a neck-like region,” said Shantanu Naidu, a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the Goldstone observations. “The images show flat facets, concavities and angular topography.”
The asteroid flew past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon.
