A LARGE asteroid has shot past Earth and reached its closest point on January 24.
Nasa has its eye on the large space rock as it’s considered a ‘near Earth object’.
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It’s called Asteroid 2017 XC62 and Nasa thinks it’s up to 623 feet wide.
That’s over twice the size of the Statue of Liberty.
The giant asteroid shot past Earth at 9,500 miles per hour on Monday.
The good news is it stayed a distance of 4.4 million miles away.
In comparison, the Moon is only about 238,900 miles from us.
The asteroid may seem pretty like it stayed pretty far away but it’s actually quite close in terms of space.
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Nasa considers anything passing near Earth’s orbit a Near-Earth Object (NEO).
Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they’re on a collision course with our planet.
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.
Plans to save Earth from asteroids
Some experts are worried that Earth isn’t yet ready to defend itself from potentially deadly asteroids.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once sparked concern by tweeting: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defence.”
Nasa is looking into to some defence methods though.
It recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission.
Nasa said: “DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact.”
The DART craft should slam into a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September with the aim of moving it off course.
Meet the man with an observatory on a Welsh hilltop who tracks thousands of potentially apocalyptic asteroids for Nasa
In other news, Nasa has revealed stunning footage of a solar flare in action.
China has built an ‘artificial moon’ to train its astronauts for future missions.
A huge asteroid was captured in eerie footage as it shot past Earth this week.
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