Strange asteroids flew past Earth and NASA captured images

A giant NASA radar in the remote Mojave Desert captured images of several impressive asteroids, including a mile-wide behemoth, as they passed near our planet.

Fortunately, there are no known asteroids that could potentially hit Earth for more than a century, and the chance of an impact from the largest class of asteroids (like the ones below) in the next thousand years is extremely low. Still, imaging provides planetary scientists with valuable information about what’s out there and how to prepare if a truly menacing space rock does come our way.

“Pictures or it didn’t happen!” NASA posted on X, formerly Twitter.

The first image below shows the 1.5-kilometer-wide asteroid 2011 UL21 as it passed at a distance of 6.6 million kilometers on June 27. The asteroid certainly didn’t graze Earth, but in space terms that’s pretty close: 17 times the distance to the moon.

And it turns out this asteroid wasn’t alone. A smaller moon orbits it 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) away.

“About two-thirds of asteroids this size are thought to be binary star systems. Their discovery is significant because we can use measurements of their relative positions to estimate their orbits, masses and densities. That information gives us important clues about how they might have formed,” Lance Benner, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

The next image shows an impressively detailed view of the 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) asteroid 2024 MK, which flew about 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers) from Earth two days later on June 29 (closer than the moon, which is about 238,900 miles away). “This was an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the physical properties and obtain detailed images of an asteroid that is close to Earth,” Benner said.

“This was an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the physical properties of a close-to-Earth asteroid and obtain detailed images.”

Vivid images of asteroid 2024 MK, seen from a distance of just 295,000 kilometers.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

An asteroid 500 feet wide would pose a serious risk to Earth’s inhabitants if it landed in a populated area. A significantly smaller rock, perhaps 100 to 170 feet wide, could cause an explosion large enough to destroy Kansas City. That’s why NASA is proactively preparing to deflect such a threat, should it come our way.

All three asteroids were captured by NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, a 230-foot-wide (70-meter) radio antenna located near Barstow, California. NASA scientists beamed radio waves toward the objects, and the reflected signals bounced back.

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The risks of an asteroid impact

Here are the general risks of asteroids or comets, both small and very large. Importantly, even relatively small rocks are still threats, as the surprising 56-foot (17-meter) rock that exploded over Russia in 2013, blowing people out of their windows, proved.

• Every day, about 100 tons of dust and sand particles fall through the Earth’s atmosphere, where they burn up immediately.

• According to NASA, on average, an asteroid the size of a car crashes through our sky and explodes every year.

• Impacts from objects about 140 meters in diameter occur every 10,000 to 20,000 years.

• An impact in which a boulder perhaps a kilometer or larger kills a dinosaur occurs on a time scale of 100 million years.