A small asteroid zoomed past Earth closer than most satellites last week — and astronomers didn't notice it until hours later.
The surprise asteroid encounter occurred at 8:47 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 30 (Wednesday, Oct. 1 at 0047 GMT) when the roughly giraffe-size space rock flew over Antarctica at just 265 miles (428 kilometers) above Earth's surface, according to newly released data from the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers first spotted the sneaky space rock — now officially named 2025 TF — a few hours later, using observations from the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded mission to track near-Earth objects.
