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Earth had its fair share of outerspace scares last week when fragments of a meteorite hit Russia in the Ural Mountains and an asteroid flew 17,200 miles from Earth’s surface (a closer pass than orbiting communication satellites).
This morning, NASA released a 72-frame video of the asteroid dubbed DA14, which has an estimated diameter of 30 meters and mass of 40,000 metric tons.
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The video was captured with the 230-foot Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California and spans 8 hours of the asteroid’s travel time.
The asteroid may look like a pixelated spinning nugget in the video above, but scientists say the video will help them study the 130ft long asteroid’s orbit and physical characteristics.
According to National Geographic, if the asteroid would have hit the Earth’s surface, the damage would have ranked on par with the devastation left by Siberia’s Tunguska event in 1908 — with the force of 180 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
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