Asteroid 2025 TC passed by the Earth at a distance of 85 271 km (22% of the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.000 57% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, but more than 200 times the altitude at which the International Space Station orbits, and more than double the distance at which geostationary satellites orbit), with a relative velocity of about 16.15 km per second, slightly before 6.35 am GMT on Friday 3 October 2025.
There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have presented a significant threat. 2025 TC has an estimated equivalent diameter of 7-23 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 7-23 m in diameter), and an object of this size would be expected to explode in an airburst (an explosion caused by superheating from friction with the Earth's atmosphere, which is greater than that caused by simply falling, due to the orbital momentum of the asteroid) more than 20 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.
2025 TC was first detected on 1 October 2025 (two days before its closest approach to the Earth), by the University of Hawaii's PANSTARRS telescope. The designation 2025 implies that it was the third asteroid (asteroid C - in numbering asteroids the letters A-Z, excluding I, are assigned numbers from 1 to 25, with a number added to the end each time the alphabet is ended, so that A = 1, A1 = 25, A2 = 49, etc., which means that C = 3) discovered in the first half of October 2025 (period 2025 T; the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded).
2025 TC is calculated to have a 1604 day (4.39 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 1.92° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.80 AU from the Sun (80% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) and out to 4.57 AU (4.57 times the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, more than three times the distance at which the planet Mars orbits). As an asteroid that is on average further from the Sun than the Earth, but which does get closer, 2025 is classified as an Apollo Group Asteroid.
This means that 2025 TC has occasional close encounters with the Earth, with the last thought to have happened in September 1978 Venus, which it last cam close to in January 2008 and is next predicted to pass in June 2084, and Venus, which it last came close to in March 1967, Mars, which it last came close to in November 1955, and Jupiter, which it last came close to in July 2019.
Asteroids which make close passes to multiple planets are considered to be in unstable orbits, and are often eventually knocked out of these orbits by these encounters, either being knocked onto a new, more stable orbit, dropped into the Sun, knocked out of the Solar System or occasionally colliding with a planet. In the case of 2025 TC, it is predicted that it will have another close encounter with Jupiter in October 2054, which will knock it onto an orbit which no longer comes close the planets of the Inner Solar System.
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