Earlier today an asteroid passed relatively close to Earth - so close in fact it was just a little more than 1/10 of the distance between us and the moon. The Virtual Telescope Project captured this image of the asteroid this morning when the asteroid was still about 155,000 miles away rom Earth.

For the record, the moon is nearly 239,000 miles away. At its closest, near-Earth asteroid 2020 OY4 was about 26,000 miles away from our planet and posed no risk to us. That's because of how small it is, which is also the reason it wasn't discovered sooner. This asteroid is only about 7.5-17 feet across, and an asteroid that small would burn up in our atmosphere before striking the surface of the planet. This asteroid was only discovered two days ago by the Mt. Lemmon survey, part of the Catalina Sky Survey which is dedicated to discovering and observing comets and asteroids.