NANJING, CHINA — Earlier this month, a Chinese telescope captured images of an asteroid headed towards earth. <br /> <br />The asteroid, labeled as 2009ES by the Minor Planet Center, is one of 1,640 “minor bodies,” celestial bodies smaller than dwarf planets that are potentially on a collision course with earth. <br /> <br />The asteroid was recently observed by the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing. The observatory’s 1.2-meter Schmit telescope is the largest of its kind in Asia, according to the China Daily. <br /> <br />Luckily, the asteroid missed. 2009ES flew by within a range of 18.8 times of the distance between the earth and the moon, the the China Daily reported. <br /> <br />The asteroid missed, but it will pass by earth again four months from now as it returns to the outer solar system. <br /> <br />But should an asteroid of its size, around 10,000 meters, collide with earth, the impact would be the equivalent to that of three billion atomic bombs.
