From NASA’s Spaceweather.com and NASA JPL Twitter feed. It only takes one missed space rock to ruin your day.

Potentially Hazardous Asteroid - 3D rendering by by Arlene Ducao

On Friday November 6th at 2132 UT (16:32/ 4:32PM EST) asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet’s surface. For comparison, Earth’s diameter is 12,756.1 km. That near miss was well inside the “Clarke Belt” of geosynchronous satellites.(35,786 km/22,236 mi)

Friday’s (Nov 6) flyby of asteroid 2009 VA is the third closest on record. (That we know about.)

If it had hit, the ~6-meter wide space rock would have disintegrated in the atmosphere as a spectacular fireball, causing no significant damage to the ground. But the fact that there was so little warning is troubling.

2009 VA was discovered just 15 hours before closest approach by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey.

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