NASA asteroid tracker: A 1,181FT monster asteroid is about to scrape past the Earth TODAY

The colossal asteroid dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2016 JP, will swing by on an “Earth Close Approach” trajectory. NASA has predicted the asteroid will pass close to Earth today (Friday, April 19), exactly one year since it last visited the Earth. The US space agency does not anticipate a devastating impact anytime soon but the asteroid’s sheer size makes it a prime target for observations. Astronomers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) estimate the closest flyby will occur around 12.13pm BST (11.13am UTC) later today.

When this happens, the space rock will come screaming past Earth at a speed of around 11.5km per second or 25,725mph (41,400kmh).

NASA’s JPL further estimates the space rock measures somewhere in the range of 524.9ft to 1,181ft (160m to 360m) in diameter.

An asteroid at the upper end of that estimate would other over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and is there times taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

The asteroid will also approach our home planet today from a distance of 0.04875 astronomical units (au).

A single astronomical unit describes the distance between the Earth and the Sun and measures about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).

READ MORE: How often do asteroids hit Earth?

Asteroid JP will cut this down today to just 4.53 million miles or 7.29 million kilometres.

In more Earthly terms, this is the equivalent of 18.97 Lunar Distances or 18.97 times as far as the Moon is.

This might seem like a lifetime away but on the grand scale of cosmic distances, the asteroid’s approach is a close brush.

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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Asteroid JP is a so-called Near-Earth Object or NEO, meaning it’s orbit occasionally crosses paths with the Earth’s own journey around the Sun.

The vast majority of NEOs zipping past our planet have been nudged into the inner circles of the solar system from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA keeps a watchful eye on all NEO approaches for planetary defect reasons but also in a bid to learn more about the earliest days of the solar system.

The space agency said: “The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due largely to their status as the relatively unchanged remnant debris from the solar system formation process some 4.6 billion years ago.

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“The giant outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – formed from an agglomeration of billions of comets and the left over bits and pieces from this formation process are the comets we see today.

“Likewise, today’s asteroids are the bits and pieces left over from the initial agglomeration of the inner planets that include Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.”

After Asteroid flies past the Earth, it will swing by again on April 17, 2020.

The space rock will then make two more April approaches in the years 2021 and 2022.

source: express.co.uk