Asteroid 2021 EQ3 will pass closer than the moon.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A particularly large asteroid passed by near Earth on Monday evening, March 15th. The fly was completely safe and posed no danger to anyone or anyone on earth or any of our satellites. But the asteroid 2021 EQ3 has come closer to Earth than our lone natural satellite.
Sky surveys and other telescopes, on average, see a space rock closer than the moon past every few days. Most of these asteroids are only a few meters wide, which probably does not make them bigger than a bus.
However, Asteroid 2021 EQ3 had an estimated diameter between 17 and 38 meters (55 to 124 feet). This makes it about the same size as the meteoroid struck in the atmosphere above Russia in 2013, which created a shock wave that blew out thousands of windows in the city of Chelyabinsk below and injured hundreds.
EQ3 passed 2021 the nearest above us at about 21:45 PT, at a distance of about 173,000 miles (278,000 km) – that is 72% of the distance from the earth to the moon.
This makes 2021 EQ3 the second largest object approaching the moon in 2021.
It is also different from 2001 FO32, which is an absolute monster with a diameter of about a kilometer. That asteroid will pass on March 21, but five times farther than the moon at a distance.
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Clarification, 22 March at 17:44 PT: The timestamp on an earlier version of this story suggested that this asteroid would fly past a week later than it did. It zoomed in safely past the earth on March 15th. Read here about the more recent asteroid, 2001 FO32.