Pasadena (California): An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth.
The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 78,532 km from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.
That is just twice as high as the orbits of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.
"This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said on Thursday.
But not as close as the tiny meteoroid 2004 FU162, which came within 6,437 km in 2004.
The space rock measured between 21 metres and 47 metres in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it about the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908.
Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia spotted 2009 DD45 and began tracking it in late February when it was about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away.
Spahr said he knew within an hour of that discovery that it would pose no threat to Earth.
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