A small asteroid named 2025 QD8 passed close to Earth, reaching its nearest point at 11:56 AM UTC and coming within about 218,000 kilometers (135,000 miles), roughly 57% of the average Earth-Moon distance, with no collision threat, according to IFLScience. The object was estimated at 17 to 38 meters in diameter, comparable to a medium passenger airplane, and traveled at over 45,080 kilometers per hour (28,000 miles per hour).
The Virtual Telescope Project streamed the encounter live on YouTube starting at 7:00 p.m. ET (11:00 PM UTC) on September 2, using images from robotic telescopes in Italy.
Experts emphasized there was no danger at any point. The asteroid passed harmlessly through Earth’s vicinity and was not considered a potentially hazardous asteroid due to its size. NASA noted there was no known asteroid that presented an impact risk to Earth within the next 100 years, and said routine monitoring of such flybys offered opportunities to test detection capabilities.
Astronomers first spotted 2025 QD8 on August 26, 2023, with the Pan-STARRS 1 survey at Haleakalā, Hawai‘i. Ahead of the flyby, the Virtual Telescope Project obtained a 300-second exposure on August 30 while the object was about 3.9 million kilometers away and closing in, according to Gizmodo. In those images, the asteroid appeared as a tiny point of light among brighter stars and was not visible to the naked eye.
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The European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center indicated the asteroid likely made close approaches to Earth in 1958, 1976, 1994, and 2007, and would make more over the next century. Earlier in the day, at 08:42 UTC, the asteroid passed the Moon at a distance of 0.00286 AU.
“That an asteroid comes so close is a nice opportunity to study it. It is also a valuable reminder of the importance of these projects that search the sky every clear night for objects that could hit our Earth - a part of the fundamental international efforts to protect the planet,” said astronomer Gianluca Masi. “Sharing such a close encounter with the community is a nice opportunity to raise public awareness of asteroids and their significance,” said Masi.
Near-Earth asteroids like 2025 QD8 - bodies whose orbits brought them periodically through Earth’s orbital neighborhood - are cataloged and analyzed by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, which characterizes their orbits, predicts close approaches, and makes comprehensive impact hazard assessments for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
Another small object, 2025 QV5, also approached Earth safely. About 11 meters in diameter, similar to a school bus, it passed at roughly 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers), nearly twice the Earth-Moon distance, and was too small to be classified as potentially hazardous. NASA included 2025 QV5 as a target for observation at the Goldstone radar telescope in California to refine its orbit and trajectory. The asteroid orbited the Sun in about 359 days and often resided between the trajectories of Earth and Venus, whose gravitational forces influenced its path; predictions could vary as new observations were collected.