Another asteroid whizzes past Earth overnight

Overnight on March 24-25, 2022, another small asteroid raced toward Earth, unseen until hours before its closest approach. Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky, same astronomer who first spotted asteroid 2022 EB5 earlier this month hours before it hit Earth near Iceland, found this new asteroid, too. He caught it just hours before it sped by Earth. This asteroid is labeled Sar2594. Its close encounter with Earth came at 8:10 UTC or 3:10 a.m. CDT.

 

There are thousands of near-Earth asteroids in the inner solar system, as depicted in this graphic. Some known and some unknown. Another asteroid discovered by the same astronomer to discover 2022 EB5 in early March made a close pass with Earth in the early hours of March 25, 2022. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Wikimedia Commons.

This time, instead of a collision, the space rock slipped through Earth’s shadow.

It passed at a distance of about 5,400 miles (8,700 km). That’s in contrast to the moon’s distance of 238,900 miles (384,000 km).

Sar2594 is categorized as a Near-Earth Object, or NEO. It raced by at about 40,265 miles an hour (18 km/s).

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