2009 DD45

Close call.

An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,500 miles (74,800 km, 0.000482 AU) from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported. 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 last Wednesday.

The space rock measured between 69 feet and 154 feet (20-50 meters) in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it about the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908.

NASA's orbital diagram of 2009 DD45 is found HERE.

The asteroid was only discovered three days before by the prolific asteroid hunter Robert McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, when the space rock was already within 2,414,016 km (1½ million miles) of Earth and closing fast.

McNaught pointed out that the 2009 DD45 asteroid circles the sun every 18 months, but its path will not threaten this planet until the next century at the earliest.