Like ships passing in the night, pair of space rocks zooms past Earth today at a distance of (only) 2.5 million miles. Dubbed Asteroid 2004 DC, the pair were not known to be a pair until radar reflections off the asteroid were detected by the Arecibo radar/radio telescope (remember the movie “Contact?”).
The green dot in the center near the bottom of the image below (from a NASA orbit simulation) is planet Earth. The scale of the image is such that the asteroid looks very close to our planet, but it is at quite a safe distance.
From SpaceWeather.com:
BINARY ASTEROID: Asteroid 2004 DC is flying by Earth today about 2.5 million miles away. Yesterday, astronomers using the giant Arecibo radar in Puerto Rico pinged the asteroid and discovered that it is actually two asteroids–a 60m rock orbiting a 300m rock. Researchers estimate that one in six near-Earth asteroids are binaries.