Asteroid alert: NASA tracks a 10,000MPH asteroid just hours away from scraping past Earth

Tomorrow morning, Asteroid WP6 will fly towards our home planet on a trajectory NASA has dubbed an ‘Earth Close Approach”.

Government agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) keep a watchful eye on these close approaches to determine if there is a possibility of impact.

In 2013, one such NEO slipped through NASA’s defences undetected and exploded in the atmosphere over Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast.

The so-called Chelyabinsk Meteor only measured 65.6ft (20m) across but the explosion injured more than 1,000 people with shards of glass from blown-out windows.

NASA said: “It seems prudent to mount efforts to discover and study these objects, to characterise their sizes, compositions and structures and to keep an eye upon their future trajectories.”

source: express.co.uk