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A football field-sized asteroid just missed Earth. No one saw it coming
asteroid larger than a football field zoomed past the Earth at a distance closer than our moon in early June, and astronomers didn’t know about it until it had already passed.The asteroid is the largest to pass near the planet in nine years, and it would have been big and fast enough to deliver a nuclear-sized explosion if it had hit Earth, according to Purdue University’s impact predictor.But it didn’t hit Earth so … this is fine?NASA data shows the asteroid, known as 2020LD, was discovered on June 7 — two days after it whizzed between the Earth and the moon. The asteroid was between 89 and 200 metres wide and passed within 306,000 kilometres of the planet, according to NASA tracking data.