Huge asteroid that narrowly missed Earth ‘slipped through the net’, Nasa emails reveal

The largest asteroid to pass as close to the Earth in a century “slipped through” Nasa’s detection systems, internal emails reveal.

Named 2019 OK by scientists, the asteroid nearly passed by undetected as it came five times closer to Earth than the moon, documents obtained by Buzzfeed via freedom of information requests revealed.

It was first detected by a Brazilian observatory on 24 July just hours before coming within roughly 73,000km of Earth. Nasa’s failure to spot the 100-metre wide space rock highlighted longstanding concerns about a lack of US government funding for asteroid detection efforts.

“This object slipped through a whole series of our capture nets, for a bunch of different reasons,” Dr Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies, wrote to colleagues on 26 July.

“So, was this just a particularly sneaky asteroid? I wonder how many times this situation has happened without the asteroid being discovered at all?”

read more here