Asteroid bigger than London Eye approaching close to Earth, warns NASA
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The famous UK landmark is 443 feet high, and the space rock is larger than the London Eye by as much as 50 per cent.
A huge asteroid believed to be more than one and half times the size of the London Eye is approaching Earth, space agency NASA has warned.
The famous UK landmark is 443 feet high, and the space rock is larger than the London Eye by as much as 50 per cent.
The space agency has given the asteroid the name Asteroid 2020ND, and have branded the asteroid "potentially hazardous".
The rock will make its closest approach to Earth on July 24, reports Birmingham Live.
NASA has warned it will come within just 0.034 astronomical units (AU) of our planet.
The space agency said: "Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth.
"Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 AYU or less are considered PHAs."
An astronomical unit is equal to about 150 million kilometres or roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
NASA said on its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website: "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.
"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."