‘Christmas asteroid’ as tall as a skyscraper to whip past Earth on December 24

A HUGE Christmas Eve asteroid is heading our way.

Nasa says Asteroid 2016 TR54 is up to 755 feet wide, making it almost 10 times bigger than this year’s Rockefeller Christmas tree in New York.

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Nasa will be keeping an eye on the giant space rock as it’s expected to make a “close approach”.

There’s no need for Santa to panic just yet though.

The asteroid should stay 4million miles away from our planet.

You may think that sounds very far away but it’s not in terms of space.

Any fast-moving space object that comes within 4.65million miles is considered to be “potentially hazardous” by cautious space organizations.

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Nasa regards anything passing within 120million miles of Earth as a Near-Earth Object (NEO).

Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they’re on a collision course with our planet.

One small change to their trajectories could spell disaster for Earth.

Asteroid 2016 TR54 should shoot past Earth at 35,000 miles per hour on Christmas Eve morning.

Astronomers track thousands of 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 feet across devastated 800 square miles of forest near Tunguska in Siberia on June 30, 1908.

In other news, the brightest comet of 2021 is heading our way and it should be visible in time for some Christmas stargazing.

Nasa has warned that a giant asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower will break into Earth’s orbit in just over a week.

An alien species could hitchhike on human spacecraft and contaminate Earth, a new study has warned.

And, Nasa has plans to put a nuclear power plant on the Moon within this decade.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk