NASA reveals images of enormous, snowman-shaped asteroid 2024 ON after its ultra-close approach to Earth

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New close-up images reveal the surprising snowman shape of "potentially hazardous" asteroid 2024 ON, which tumbled safely past our planet on Sept. 17.

A composite image showing different angles of the snowman-shaped asteroid 2024 ON as it flew close to Earth recently
The "potentially hazardous" asteroid 2024 ON looks like a tipsy cosmic snowman in these radar images obtained by the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Solar System Radar. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA scientists have released fascinating images of an asteroid that zipped past Earth this week — revealing it to be the shape of a weird tumbling snowman.

The asteroid, named 2024 ON, flew safely past our planet at a distance of 620,000 miles (1 million kilometers) — roughly 2.6 times the distance between the moon and Earth — on Tuesday (Sept. 17). It was traveling at 19,842 mph (31,933 km/h), or around 26 times the speed of sound.

"This asteroid is classified as potentially hazardous, but it does not pose a hazard to Earth for the foreseeable future," NASA wrote in a statement. "These Goldstone measurements have allowed scientists to greatly reduce the uncertainties in the asteroid's distance from Earth and in its future motion for many decades."

Related: Earth once wore a Saturn-like ring, study of ancient craters suggests

NASA deems any space object that comes within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet as "potentially hazardous," even if they pose no immediate threat to Earth. That's because even slight nudges to such an asteroid's trajectory — say, by bumping into another asteroid — could send it onto a collision course with Earth.

NASA tracks the locations and orbits of roughly 28,000 asteroids by scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours. The space agency has estimated the trajectories of all these near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century, and found that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.

Ben Turner
Ben Turner
Acting Trending News Editor

Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.