NASA astronomers were able to obtain radar images of the large asteroid that passed Earth safely on Monday, April 15, 2024. They captured an image of the asteroid – named 2013 NK4 – using the Goldstone Radar in California on April 13. NASA said:







These observations suggest asteroid 2013 NK4 is probably a binary contact. That means it’s composed of two bodies or asteroids that have gravitated toward each other until they touch, resulting in this elongated shape. If a two-lobed asteroid sounds familiar to you, that’s because we’ve seen space rocks like this before. For example, there’s 4769 Castalia, discovered in 1989. It’s even larger at 1.4 kilometers (0.87 miles) in diameter and is also classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid. And another example is Arrokoth, visited by the New Horizons mission. Arrokoth looks a bit like a snowman and lies out in the Kuiper Belt.


Asteroid 2013 NK4 has a diameter of about 2,000 feet (610 meters). That makes it about twice as large as Apophis, the so-called doomsday asteroid that will pass closer than Earth’s artificial satellites in 2029. But 2013 NK4 passed us at a much greater distance. It was more than 8 times the moon’s distance at its nearest to us. What’s so amazing about it? People with telescopes will be able to watch it fly by Earth!

Closest approach for asteroid 2013 NK4 happened on Monday, April 15, 2024, at 14:51 UTC. But, due to its location in the sky, it’ll be easier to see through a telescope on the nights of April 16 and 17.

Because the asteroid occasionally passes near Earth and is a fairly large space rock, 2013 NK4 holds the scary-sounding designation of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. However, we’ve known about asteroid 2013 NK4 since 2013 (thus the year designation in its name), and it has a well-defined orbit. There was absolutely no danger to Earth during its flyby.

2013 NK4 orbits the sun every 378 days. But its orbit is slightly more elliptical than ours. Its orbit goes out past Mars and then dives in between the orbits of Venus and Mercury. The asteroid sped past our planet at 36,909 miles per hour (59,400 km per hour) or 10.2 miles per second (16.5 km per second), relative to Earth.