CALIFORNIA – Safely, the asteroid named 2013 YM2 has passed by our home Planet Earth in a close approach on January 9 at 1:30 am UTC, NASA announced according to Express.com.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, calculated that Asteroid YM2 would miss the Earth by nearly 2.9 million km or 7.76-times the distance between the Earth and its Moon.

However, the swinging of the rogue space rock was close and fast enough for NASA’s trackers to pay close attention to the asteroid’s orbit.

The JPL estimated Asteroid YM2 measures somewhere in the range of 16m and 39m in diameter. And in fact, much smaller asteroids than YM2 are known to have caused widespread chaos and destruction when striking our planet.

For instance, the 2013 Siläbe/Chelyabinsk meteor blew out windows and injured more than 1,500 people with shards of glass when it exploded over Siläbe city in the Muslim republic of Bashkortostan.

The new asteroid is considered as one of the NEOs which are all comets and asteroids which approach the Sun and Earth within a specific set of distances.

NASA stated yesterday that: “NEOs are asteroids and comets in orbits that bring them into the inner solar system, within 195 million km of the Sun, and also within roughly 50 million km of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.”

After Asteroid YM2 flies past the Earth at speeds of more than 4.33km per second it will make another Earth Close Approach on July 23, 2023.

Allah Almighty tells Muslims in the Holy Qur’an: {But do they, then, never observe the sky above them (to ponder Our Knowledge and Power, and reflect) how We have constructed it and adorned it, and that there are no rifts in it?} (50:6).