If you’ve ever felt out of the loop at work, rest assured—you’re not alone.
Recently, while the swift-moving asteroid 3I/ATLAS has captured public attention, another asteroid managed to quietly steal the show. On Wednesday, October 1st, astronomers from around the globe overlooked an asteroid making the second-closest pass to Earth ever recorded.
This asteroid, called 2025 TF, sailed just 260 miles above Antarctica. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly the same distance as the International Space Station, which orbits about 260 miles from our planet.
The asteroid, about the size of a small car, passed alarmingly close to us without being noticed. It’s akin to missing the knock on your door during a prank, only this prankster was a space rock traveling at 46,000 mph.
The closest pass ever recorded was by asteroid 2020 VT4, which flew 230 miles above Earth’s surface on November 13, 2020.
The asteroid 2025 TF was detected by Kitt Peak-Bok Observatory in Arizona at 06:36 UTC on October 1, less than six hours after its closest approach.
On October 2, amateur astronomer Filipp Romanov confirmed sightings of the asteroid via the Liverpool Telescope at Liverpool John Moores University’s Astrophysics Research Institute in the UK, sharing a photo of the space rock.
The elusive asteroid belongs to the Apollo group, a category of near-Earth asteroids that occasionally come quite close to us. It zipped by at a staggering 46,700 miles per hour and is believed to be traveling between Venus’s orbit and out past Mars.
Because scientists only had a day to observe 2025 TF, its long-term trajectory remains uncertain, prompting astronomers to monitor it closely.
Since January 2025, approximately 118 asteroids have been discovered within one lunar distance of Earth, which is 238,855 miles, the distance from our planet to the Moon. In September 2025, alone, 25 such asteroids came within that proximity.
Meanwhile, NASA and other space agencies are closely observing 3I/ATLAS, the third identified interstellar space object, meaning it originated beyond our Solar System.
Traveling at a speed exceeding 41 miles per second, it’s moving too quickly to be controlled by the Sun’s gravity and was earlier described as ‘possibly hostile,’ with concerns it could cause havoc on Earth.
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb has speculated that 3I/ATLAS might not be ‘natural’ but possibly a mothership dispatched from an alien world. The European Space Agency plans to use its Mars and Jupiter spacecraft to track this object as it journeys through the solar system.
This object, which might be a comet or a mothership, is set to make its closest approach to Earth on October 30, the notably eerie date. It will come as close as 1.8 astronomical units, approximately 170 million miles away. This is about 1.8 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, essentially keeping it in deep space and posing no threat.
Doing some additional calculations, this is around 400,000 times farther than the pass made by 2025 TF.
NASA assures us that Comet 3I/ATLAS ‘poses no threat to Earth and will remain far away.’