A GIGANTIC asteroid will make a knee-wobbling flyby of Earth today, Nasa has warned.
Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) is estimated to be around 3,551 feet long – making it larger than any building on Earth.
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It’s expected to zip safely past our planet at 4:51 p.m. EST (9:51 p.m. UK time) on January 18.
Nasa is keeping a close eye on the huge space rock and has added it to its “close approaches” database.
The asteroid is expected to pass Earth at a distance of around 1.2million miles – roughly five times the gap between our planet and the Moon.
This may seem a fair distance but it’s a close shave in space terms.
Nasa considers anything passing within 120million miles of Earth a Near-Earth Object (NEO).
Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they’re on a collision course with our planet.
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Any fast-moving space object that comes within 4.65 million miles is considered to be “potentially hazardous” by cautious space organizations.
One small change to their trajectories could spell disaster for Earth.
Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) should be travelling at just under 44,000 miles per hour, according to Nasa.
The asteroid is said to cross Earth’s orbit every 30 years or so.
It isn’t expected to come this close again for another 200 years.
The Virtual Telescope Project will be streaming the asteroid’s close encounter if you want to watch it live.
Astronomers are currently tracking nearly 2,000 asteroids, comets and other objects that threaten our pale blue dot, and new ones are found every day.
Earth hasn’t seen an asteroid of apocalyptic scale since the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs 66million years ago.
However, smaller objects capable of flattening an entire city crash into Earth every so often.
One a few hundred metres across devastated 800 square miles of forest near Tunguska in Siberia on June 30, 1908.
Fortunately, Nasa doesn’t believe any of the NEOs it keeps an eye on are on a collision course with our planet.
That could change in the coming months or years, however, as the space agency constantly revises objects’ predicted trajectories.
“Nasa knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small,” Nasa says.
“In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.”
Even if they were to hit our planet, the vast majority of asteroids would not wipe out life as we know it.
“Global catastrophes” are only triggered when objects larger than 900 metres smash into Earth, according to Nasa.
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Meet the man with an observatory on a Welsh hilltop who tracks thousands of potentially apocalyptic asteroids for Nasa
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