Asteroid 2021 QM1, once thought to have a chance of impacting Earth in 2052, was spotted passing through a region of the sky with the Milky Way just behind it. The small, faint, receding asteroid had to be found against a backdrop of thousands of stars, with red crosses indicating the path of the object.
Find out how astronomers and asteroid experts detected it, and how these observations revealed it will not impact in a few decades, and could be removed from risk lists around the globe.