The asteroid - about the size of a 10-storey building - flew past the Earth at roughly twice the distance of the highest Earth-orbiting satellites, according to website space.com. It is similar in size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908, flattening 80 million trees across an 800 square mile area. The impact had the force of a thousand atomic bombs, astronomers say. Asteroid 2009 DD45
was closest to the earth on Monday at around 8.30am, at just under 45,000 miles above the surface of the planet.
Astronomers knew it was coming after it was spotted last Saturday as a faint dot showing up in pictures at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. There was never any risk of collision, experts said, but anything flying within 50,000 miles of the Earth is taken very seriously.
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