The asteroid has been dubbed ‘Florence’ and is about 2.7 miles in length – one of the largest that the space agency has ever detected and the largest to ever fly past Earth without hitting it.
It will skim past Earth on September
Florence will fly by at a relatively safe distance of 4.4 million miles away – around 18 times the distance between the Earth and the moon – but still close enough to be classed as a ‘near-Earth object’.
The asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs was around six miles in length, it is believed.
Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller.
“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”
Due to its massive size, boffins at the space agency believe that it is an ideal candidate to test out new asteroid observation technologies.
Using new Earth-based radars, Nasa says that it can capture surface details on the giant asteroid that would be as small as 10 metres.
Nasa explained in a statement: “When these small, natural remnants of the formation of the solar system pass relatively close to Earth, deep space radar is a powerful technique for studying their sizes, shapes, rotation, surface features and roughness, and for more precise determination of their orbital path.”