Close call? Asteroid gets close to Earth

NASA has confirmed that an asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 78,500 kilometres from Earth when it zipped past early Monday. 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 Wednesday.

But it was not as close as the tiny meteoroid 2004 FU162, which came within 6,500 kilometres in 2004. The space rock measured between 21 metres and 47 metres in diameter.

The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and levelled more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest.

Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia spotted 2009 DD45 and began tracking it in late February when it was about 1.6 million kilometres away although they knew that it would pose no threat to Earth.

Donald Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena says the next time an object will get closer to Earth will be in 2029 when an 270-metre asteroid called 99942 Apophis comes within 32,000 kilometres.

Last year, the asteroid 2008 TC3 harmlessly burned up in Earth's atmosphere over Africa 19 hours after it was discovered. Astronomers issued a warning six hours ahead of that fiery plunge.

More information of the Internet at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/