Scientists monitoring the asteroid activity told a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program the space rock traveled over London at more than 20 miles a second before missing the planet by just 480,000 miles – twice the distance to the moon but a near miss in astronomical terms.
He said the advancement in image detecting technology enabled scientists to detect asteroid activity more accurately. "Not long ago something like this would have been totally overlooked," he said.
"We are beginning to realize that we're in a bit of a shooting gallery," said Robin Scagell, vice-president of the Society for Popular Astronomy.
The asteroid appeared without warning above the capital at 2400 GMT on Friday and is still visible through a reasonably powerful telescope in the constellation of Ophiuchus, according to scientists.
The asteroid, given the name of 2000 YA, was big enough to have devastated London and would have left a crater three quarters of a mile across, Scagell said.
"We've probably been quite lucky up to now," he added. "There are probably thousands of objects of this size out there." Duncan Steel, the author of Target Earth, a book about asteroids, told the radio that an asteroid of that size would easily take out the whole city of London out to its suburban belt.
The last asteroid "hit," reported in Siberia in 1908, unleashed energy equivalent to about 20 megatons of TNT, enough to annihilate any large population center.
Britain has been preoccupied with the threat from asteroids and earlier in the autumn a government task force backed proposals to build a new asteroid observation post in the Southern Hemisphere. There have also been calls for setting up an asteroid defense center in Britain and other measures to mitigate any future impacts.
But in November astronomers who said the Earth could be struck by a small asteroid in 2030 revised their assessment a day later, saying the asteroid 2000SG344 would in fact miss the Earth by about three million miles.
Asteroid 2000SG344 was the first recorded extraterrestrial object to be given a threat rating of greater than zero on the 0-10 Torino scale of dangerous objects from space.
The asteroid was spotted on Sept. 29 by astronomers David Tholen and Robert Whiteley using the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6-meter telescope on the island of Hawaii.
Currently, asteroid 2000SG344 is about nine million miles away and moving away.
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