This afternoon an asteroid the size of a house passed between Earth and the moon. At its closest Asteroid 2023 LZ was still expected to be about 197,000 miles away from earth, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The moon is another 42,000 miles beyond that, so this passed roughly 4/5 of the distance to the moon and posed no threat to Earth. 

Image Credit: NASA JPL

This asteroid was just discovered earlier this week, on June 10, by the Pan-STARRS2 telescope in Hawaii. That project is mostly funded by NASA's Near Earth Object Observation Program, meaning the telescope's job is to do exactly what it did here. It, along with Pan-STARRS1, scans specific sections of the sky every night looking for smaller objects that are impossible to see until they get close to the Earth. In fact, the NEO Observation Program is tasked with detecting objects 140 meters in diameter or larger. Asteroid 2023 LZ is roughly 20 meters, so this was a great find by Pan-STARRS2 and the scientists on that project. Now it will continue on its trajectory shown above, taking it farther away from Earth.