Watch This Asteroid Pass By Earth

Asteroids pass us by all the time, ranging in size and distance from Earth, but we’re nowhere near needing to hire Bruce Willis and his gang of misfits to save us yet. Either way, an Italian observatory captured a few frames of a building-sized rock flying by earlier today.

The creatively named 2012 LZ1 asteroid came within 5.3 million kilometres of the Earth as it passed by, according to CNET. Putting that distance into context: the Moon is between 363,000 and 405,000 kilometres from Earth, while Mars is between 54.6 million and 401 million kilometres from Earth. [YouTube via CNET]


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