NASA expects the monstrous asteroid to fly past Earth at about 6pm GMT (UTC) today.
The space agency’s astronomers dubbed the space rock Asteroid 2018 TF3 following its discovery this year.
Asteroid experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California estimate Asteroid TF3 measures anywhere 754.6ft and 1,673ft (230m and 510m) in diameter.
At 1,673ft, the asteroid is an incredibly imposing object with a catastrophic potential for destruction.
The asteroid is about four times as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, about six times as tall as Big Ben’s clock tower in London and three times taller than St Paul’s Cathedral.
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Compared to the impressive Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, the asteroid is twice as tall and is also 1.3-times the height of The Empire State Building.
On the lower end of the estimate, the space rock is 2.5-times taller than the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben’s Tower.
The towering asteroid would still stand 1.8-times as at tall as the Giza Pyramid.
According to astronomer Matija Cuk, Cornell University in New York, an asteroid impact on this scale could be cataclysmic to human life.
He said: “An impact in the ocean would create a tsunami and definitely produce significant destruction on the nearby seaside.
“These events usually do not leave a crater and typically involve a 100m asteroid or comet.”
Asteroid TF3 is expected to safely skim the planet from a minimum distance of 0.01996 astronomical units (au).
One au is a unit of measurement used to calculate distances in space and is equivalent to the distance from the Sun to the Earth – about 93 million miles (149.5 million km).
In this case, Asteroid TF3 will fly by the planet from a distance of 1.85 million miles (2.98 million km).
The distance is roughly equivalent to 7.77 Lunar Distances (LD) or 7.77-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
This might seem like a lifetime away but on an astronomical scale of distances, it is an extremely close brush.
So close, NASA has dubbed it an Earth Close Approach by a Near-Earth Object (NEO).
The space agency said: “As they orbit the Sun, Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth.
“Note that a ‘close’ passage astronomically can be very far away in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometres.”
Asteroid TF3 will fly by at a relative speed of about 46,080mph or 20.6km per second.
Tonight’s pass marks the asteroid’s first Earth Close Approach in more than 50 years.
The asteroid last visited our corner of space on October 25, 1965, and May 2, 1922, before that.
According to NASA, the space rock also regularly swings by the planets of Venus and Jupiter, with the next flyby of the gas giant scheduled to take place on September 16, 2020.
Asteroid TF3 will next safely skim the Earth in the morning hours of February 9, 2022.