The imposing asteroid will fly past the Earth in the wee morning hours of Tuesday, April 2. NASA’s scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California expect the space rock to show up around 2.34am BST (1.34amUTC). The asteroid, dubbed by NASA asteroid 2019 FN1, is hurtling towards Earth on a so-called “Earth Close Approach” trajectory. And when the asteroid swings by, it will do so at breakneck speeds of 8.97km per second or 20,056mph (32,277kmph).
The JPL further estimates Asteroid FN1 measures somewhere in the range of 32.8ft to 75.5ft (10m to 23m) in diameter.
At 75.5ft across, the space rock is more than two times as long as a London double-decker bus.
An asteroid this big is just large enough to cause considerable damage upon atmospheric entry.
A similarly sized object exploded in the skies over Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast in February 2013.
READ MORE: How often do asteroids hit Earth?
The so-called Chelyabinsk Meteor damaged more than 7,000 buildings and injured more than 1,000 people when it erupted.
But the good news is Asteroid FN1 is not poised to repeat the terrifying incident tomorrow.
Asteroids like FN1 often cross paths with Earth’s orbit of the Sun and are called “Near-Earth Objects” or NEOs.
NEOs are all comets and asteroids nudged into the inner circles of the solar system, which come dangerously close to Earth.
READ MORE: NASA plans to save Earth by derailing a 2,600FT asteroid system
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.”
Thankfully, the asteroids rarely come close enough to the Earth to strike the planet at full speed.
Asteroid FN1 will near-miss the Earth tomorrow from a distance of about 0.02172 astronomical units.
READ MORE: Watch major asteroid DESTROY Earth in fiery crash simulation
Just one astronomical unit measures about 93 million miles (149.6 million km) and describes the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Tomorrow, Asteroid FN1 will trim the distance down to about two million miles (3.25 million km).
The distance in question is roughly the equivalent of 8.45 Lunar Distances (LD) or 8.45 times the distance between the Earth and its moon.
NASA currently knows of no comet or asteroid headed for a direct collision course with Earth.
The US space agency said: “In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.”