Asteroid Passes Near Earth -- with it's own Moon!

On Monday, January 26th, an asteroid passed by the earth at about 3x the distance between the moon and the earth.  The asteroid is about a third of a mile in size.

Interestingly, the asteroid had its own moon (about 240 feet in diameter) circling it.

The asteroid was named 2004 BL86, because it was first spotted back in 2004 (by an observatory in New Mexico).

CNN Reports:

It was far enough that it didn't pose a threat to Earth, but close enough to give scientists and amateurs a chance to observe a large asteroid up close.NASA asteroid 2004 BL86 was revealed to have its own small moon.
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It was the closest known asteroid this large to pass near Earth until 2027, when an asteroid called 1999 AN10 flies by.

Read more here:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/26/us/asteroid-flyby/index.html

Large Asteroid Passes near Earth

An asteroid as wide as two football fields passed relatively close to Earth.  The nearest it came to our planet was roughly eight times the distance from the earth to the moon (the Earth-moon distance averages 239,000 miles) -- so the asteroid passed about 2 million miles from the Earth!



Read more about other asteroids and this event here:
http://www.weather.com/news/science/space/large-asteroid-2014-cu13-pass-earth-20140309