On June 8th the asteroid 2014 HQ124whizzed past the Earthat a distance of 1.25 million kilometer . NASA has offer outstandingly detailed figure of the 370 thou tenacious object , unwrap feature as little as 4 m wide .

The first five images are taken by using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to collect radar signals bounced off the asteroid from   the 70 m dish at Goldstone , California . The rest were take with a smaller dish near the Goldstone accumulate the reverberate signal , which is why they are much glum .

The images can be see as a video below . Each image represents ten min of information :

It is thought the two lobe may once have been separate asteroids that fused to create the bowling pin physical body we see . " This may be a double object , or ' contact binary star , ' consisting of two object that spring a single asteroid with a lobed material body , " say Lance Benner of NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena , California .

By coincidence , The Beast , as the asteroid has been list , rotates once every 24 hours .

asteroid pop off at three times the distance of the moonshine usually do n’t attract much attention , but the Beast , while no “ dinosaur grampus ” is large enough to do serious damage . “ This would definitely be catastrophic if it collide with Earth . You ’d finish up with a crater about 3 miles across,“said Dr Mark Bosloughof the Sandia National Laboratories . " An outcome like that would break window over 100 km away . "   suitably , Boslough , an asteroid expert as well as protector of scientific discipline has had   a place rock,73520 Bosloughnamed after him , although its orbit puts it safely out of reaching of Earth .

Moreover , having only been discovered on April 23 , the Beast serves as a reminder of the value of programs to identify scourge from infinite . We are cerebrate to have discovered almost all of the inner solar system objects bombastic enough toendanger civilization , but tidy sum that we ’d much prefer to have plenty of warning about are still out there undetected .

A model of the Beast ’s orbit can be seen here :