A smaller asteroid (about 4 to 8 meters in diameter), named "2020 HS7" made a close flyby on April 28. NASA has been tracking the object and ruled out the possibility of the object posing any threat to Earth. At its closest approach, 2020 HS7 was at a distance of about 23,000 miles/36,400 km from Earth. Even if it was on a collision path with Earth, it is small enough that it would have been disintegrated by our Earth’s atmosphere.”

A larger near-Earth asteroid safely flew past our planet on April 29, providing astronomers with an exceptional opportunity to study the 1.5-mile-wide (2-kilometer-wide) object in great detail. The asteroid, called 1998 OR2, made its closest approach of about 3.9 million miles (6.3 million kilometers). While this is known as a "close approach" by astronomers, it was still very far away: The asteroid got no closer than the Moon, passing more than 16 times farther away than the Moon. Despite this, 1998 OR2 is still categorized as a large "potentially hazardous asteroid" because, over the course of millennia, very slight changes in the asteroid's orbit may cause it to present more of a hazard to Earth than it does now. This is one of the reasons why tracking this asteroid during its close approach — using telescopes and especially ground-based radar — is important, as observations such as these will enable a better long-term assessment of the hazard presented by this asteroid.

Close approaches by large asteroids like 1998 OR2 are quite rare. On average, we expect asteroids like these to fly by this close to our planet roughly once every five years. The previous close approach by a large asteroid was made by asteroid Florence in September 2017 (around 2.7 miles/4.4 kilometers wide with the closest approach of 4.4 million miles (7 million km) to Earth — just 18 times the distance from our planet to the moon. To date, astronomers have discovered around 22682 near-earth asteroids, with new ones being found each day. It's important to track these objects regularly and identify the ones that might endanger our planet.