The asteroid unleashed an energy of 250 tons of TNT when it fragmented over Ohio, causing the booms and explosive noises heard as far as New York, officials said.

NASA says the asteroid, which was approximately 7 tons, unleashed an energy of 250 tons of TNT when it 'fragmented' in Medina County.

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders, with few of the smooth patches that earlier observations from Earth-based instruments had indicated.

A bus-size asteroid known as 2026 EG1 flew past Earth closer than the moon late Thursday. Here's what NASA had to say about the close pass. (Adobe Photo)

NASA said earlier this month that an asteroid that at one point had a 4% chance of hitting the moon will miss the lunar object in 2032.

The mission without a doubt proves that we could deflect a hazardous asteroid away from Earth — so long as we discover it in the nick of time.

NASA's DART mission didn’t just change the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid it hit. It changed the orbit of the larger Didymos around the sun.

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft has completed a major deep-space manoeuvre and is now on course to reach the Didymos asteroid system in late 2026. It will survey the site where Nasa's DART mission changed an asteroid's orbit for the first time in history.