A small asteroid the "size of a house" Sunday went "very close" to Earth without posing any danger to the planet, NASA said.
"Nothing to worry about, is 40,000 kilometers," the American space agency on its Twitter account at the time of the passage of the asteroid about 20 meters in diameter, the "vicinity" of the Earth.
According to NASA calculations, the time of closest approach to Earth asteroid, dubbed "RC 2014" was at 14:18 hours on the east cost of the United States (18:18 GMT), when it passed over New Zealand as the nearest point.
The celestial body was discovered on Aug. 31 by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) program, operated by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, which uses data from three telescopes to search for comets, asteroids and near-Earth Objects .
The size of the asteroid, estimated at about 20 meters in diameter, was established on the basis of "the brilliance of his reflection," NASA said.
The asteroid was also detected independently week by the Pan-STARRS Telescope Observatory located in Hawaii, who reported their observations to the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union in Cambridge (Massachusetts).
The 40,000 km minimum distance that rose from the surface of the Earth at the time closer is a tenth of the space between the center of the Earth to the Moon, why scientists had warned that due to its small size could not be detected with the naked eye.
However, they warned that amateur astronomers could try to capture the appearance in small telescopes asteroid that moves quickly and whose orbit around the Sun "will bring us back to the vicinity of our planet in the future."
According to calculations by NASA, the asteroid should pass outside the geosynchronous orbit communications satellites and meteorological orbiting 36,000 miles above the surface of our planet.
NASA had announced on September 3 that this is a "unique opportunity" for the scientific community to observe and learn more about asteroids.
"The movement of the asteroid will be closely watched, but have not identified future Earth threatening encounter," said NASA.
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