The asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 AH13, is expected to make a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimated the asteroid will swing by around 4.22pm GMT (UTC). During the daring flyby, the rogue asteroid will reach breakneck speeds of more than 5,368mph (2.4km per second). The NASA revelation comes just 10 days after the JPL first observed the asteroid on January 13 this year.
Thankfully, humanity can carry on safely today as the asteroid will miss the Earth by more than 4.5 million miles (7.2 million km).
But the flyby is close enough for NASA to pay attention and the asteroid’s size is another worrying factor to account for.
The JPL estimates Asteroid AH13 measures somewhere in the range of 52ft to 121.4ft (16m to 37m) in diameter.
Any asteroid this big is nearly 20-times bigger than a Twin Size bed and is nine-times as long as a Volkswagen Beetle car.
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Much smaller asteroids have been known to cause considerable damage to the planet in past incidents.
The last such incident was the 2013 Chelyabinsk Meteor – an undetected 65.6ft-wide (20m) asteroid which hit Russia six years ago.
The rogue asteroid erupted over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Siberia, damaging more than 7,000 buildings and injuring 1,500 people with shards of glass.
According to NASA, the space rock exploded in the air with the force of around 440,000 tons of TNT.
NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson: “The Chelyabinsk event drew widespread attention to what more needs to be done to detect even larger asteroids before they strike our planet.”
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Mr Johnson underlined the asteroid strike was a cosmic “wake-up call” to the asteroid dangers lurking in space.
Because of incidents like the Chelyabinsk meteor, NASA pays close attention to so-called “Near-Earth Objects” (NEOs) like Asteroid AH13.
NEOs are all comets and asteroids on trajectories crossing the Earth’s orbit too closely to ignore.
NASA 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.”
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Today, Asteroid AH13 will approach the Earth from a distance of 0.04856 astronomical units (au) or 18.9 Lunar Distances.
One astronomical unit is approximately 93 million miles (149.6 million km) – the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Asteroid AH13 will shorten this down to just 4.51 million miles today (7.26 million km).
This is roughly the equivalent of 18.9-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.