NASA asteroid WARNING: Giant 154ft asteroid found barreling on 'Earth approach' TOMORROW

The asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 AB5, will zip past Earth late on Saturday, January 19. NASA’s scientists expect Asteroid AB5 to make a so-called “Earth Close Approach” around 10.55pm GMT. During this flyby, the asteroid will reach its closest possible distance to Earth for the first and possibly last time in its orbit. NASA astronomers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) do not foresee any future accounts with the rogue space rock.

Right now, however, the asteroid is big enough for astronomers to pay close attention to its trajectory through the solar system.

The JPL estimates Asteroid AB5 measures somewhere in the range of 68.9ft to 154ft (21m to 47m) in diameter.

At the upper end of that estimate, AB5 is about three-times taller than the world-famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and is about as tall as The Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

But even an asteroid at the lower end of this scale could prove incredibly dangerous if it collides with our home world.

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A similarly sized space rock slammed into the Earth in 2013 after it remained undetected by astronomers until its point of impact.

The so-called Chelyabinsk meteor exploded in the air over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia, blowing out windows in more than 7,000 buildings and injuring more than 1,500 people with shards of glass.

NASA estimated at the time the asteroid “screamed into Earth’s atmosphere” at 41,600mph (18.6km per second) and measured around 65.6ft (20m).

The US space agency said: “The explosion released more than 30 times the energy from the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.”

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Thankfully tomorrow’s passage of Asteroid AB5 will see the imposing space rock miss the Earth by nearly two million miles.

At its closest, the asteroid will approach the Earth from 0.01915 astronomical units (au) or 7.45 Lunar Distances (LD).

One astronomical unit describes the distance between the Earth and the Sun and measures approximately 93 million miles (149.6 million km).

Asteroid AB5 will considerably shortest his distance down to just 1.78 million miles (2.86 million km).

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This is the equivalent of 7.45-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

The flyby might seem like a lifetime away in human terms but it is close enough for NASA to dub the space rock a “Near-Earth Object” (NEO).

NASA explained: “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.”

During the flyby, Asteroid AB5 will dash past the planet at speeds of about 14,850mph (6.64km per second).

source: express.co.uk