On July 25, a massive asteroid passed 40,400 miles over the Earth—and NASA did not see it coming, according to internal emails obtained by BuzzFeed News. In an email alert to space agency experts, Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, wrote “because there may be media coverage tomorrow, I’m alerting you that in about 30 mins a 57-130 meter sized asteroid will pass Earth at only 0.19 lunar distances (~48,000 miles).”
Named “2019 OK,” the football-field-sized space rock was spotted by a small observatory in Brazil, and NASA was made aware of it just 24 hours before it whizzed past Earth. Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory called it a “sneaky” space rock and wrote in an email to his colleagues two days after the flyby that “this object slipped through a whole series of our capture nets.” “I wonder how many times this situation has happened without the asteroid being discovered at all,” he wrote. NASA’s late catch shows holes in NASA’s surveillance network and decades of congressional failure to fix the problem, according to BuzzFeed.
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