The monster asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2016 AZ8, is expected to make a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. The asteroid will reach its closest possible distance to our homeworld in the early morning hours of Monday, January 7. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists in Pasadena, California, estimate a close flyby at around 6.41am GMT (UTC). And the space rock’s impressive dimensions are a more than good enough reason to track the asteroid’s trajectory past Earth.
NASA estimates the space rock measures somewhere in the range of 557.7ft and 1,246.7ft (170m and 380m) in diameter.
At the upper end of this terrifying estimate, Asteroid AZ8 is almost four-times taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
An asteroid this big is up to 14-times longer than a London double-decker bus, four-times taller than Big Ben’s tower and towers over the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
At this size, the potential cataclysmic power of the rogue asteroid is tremendous even if astronomers do not expect a direct hit to occur.
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Based on calculations by the Earth Impact Effects Program, a hint project between the Imperial College London and Purdue University, the impact force of a similarly sized asteroid equals about 3,300 megatons of TNT.
The exact force of impact will vary depending on the speed and composition of Asteroid AZ8 but the potential for cataclysm and loss of human life is extreme.
Thankfully, none of this will come to pass because the asteroid will miss the planet by many millions of miles.
At its closest, the asteroid will reach 0.02978 astronomical units (au) or 11.59 Lunar Distances (LD) from Earth.
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One astronomical unit is a standard measure of distance in space and equals the distance from Earth to the Sun – about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).
Asteroid AZ8 will close this distance down to just 2.76 million miles (4.45 million km) from Earth.
This incredibly near miss on the cosmic scale of distances is the equivalent of 11.59-times the distance of Earth to the Moon.
A NASA report on the subject of Near-Earth Asteroids like AZ8, reads: “Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets that come close to or pass across Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
“They range in size from small ‘meteoroids’ only a few meters across, to much larger bodies several kilometres wide.
“When NEO orbits bring them into Earth’s atmosphere, smaller objects harmlessly fragment and disintegrate, while larger objects can cause local damage or even global devastation.”
On Monday, Asteroid AZ8 will fly by at breakneck speeds of more than 20,400mph (9.15km per second).
After it passes the Earth, the space rock will return to Earth’s corner of space on January 23, 2022.