NASA space scientists were closely monitoring a massive asteroid that flew past Earth on last Friday morning.
Asteroid 2015 DR215 was on NASA’s ‘close approach’ list. But don’t worry, it was a safe distance away!
It was thought to have passed Earth at a distance of 4.1 million miles away so it would have been no danger to us!
The asteroid was around 1,600 feet wide, which is three times larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
What are asteroids?
Asteroids are giant space rocks in our solar system that orbit the Sun.
Sometimes they are called NEOs – Near Earth Objects.
The last big asteroid to actually hit Earth was 66 million years ago. This one caused the dinosaurs to become extinct – but roughly some 26,000 have skimmed past Earth since 1990, according to NASA’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies.
There are lots of asteroids that Nasa constantly monitors which are 140 meters or larger and are classed as hazardous.
Smaller asteroids strike the Earth almost all the time but due to their much smaller size, they get burnt up in the atmosphere before they hit ground
