Tiny moon discovered around asteroid that’s due to fly by Earth on May 31st

An asteroid the size of the Golden Gate Bridge (about 1.7 miles wide) is due to fly near the Earth on May 31st, that much scientists have known for a while. But what they did not know was that the asteroid, named 1998 QE2, would be bringing along a friend. New radar imagery of the asteroid’s approach taken by NASA scientists using an antennae in Goldstone, California, has revealed that the asteroid contains a tiny moon of its own, approximately 2,000 feet wide. Check out the asteroid and its moon in a video released today by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

NASA notes this isn’t totally unexpected, as around 16 percent of the near-Earth asteroids are thought to exist in “binary,” or multiple-object, orbits. Still, neither the asteroid nor its companion moon should pose any danger to the Earth: both are expected to sail by at a safe distance of 3.6 million miles.