A "potentially hazardous" asteroid, roughly the same length as the London Eye, is set to skim past Earth on Wednesday, according to a report by The Independent.
NASA is tracking the movement of the huge rock, named 2013 WV44, which measures 160 metres in diameter. The US space agency's Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies said that the asteroid will pass within 3.3 million kilometres of Earth, which is quite close in terms of celestial objects but poses no threat to Earth.
The space agency first discovered the asteroid in 2013 and a team of astronomers said that it travels at 11.8 km per second roughly 34 times the speed of sound.
According to The Independent, the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth at 9 am BST on June 28 (1.30 pm IST).
Last month, NASA warned about a bus-sized asteroid that was expected to make its closest approach to Earth.
According to NASA's Asteroid Watch page, the 39-foot bus-sized Asteroid 2023 JL1 will pass by Earth at a distance of 2,490,000 kilometres. It is travelling at a speed of 26,316 kilometres per hour.
Notably, NASA's dashboard tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The dashboard displays the date of the closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. It tracks asteroids that are within 7.5 million kilometres of Earth.
Some 30,000 asteroids of all sizes -- including more than 850 larger than a kilometre wide -- have been catalogued in the vicinity of the Earth, earning them the label "Near Earth Objects" (NEOs). None of them threatens the Earth for the next 100 years.
According to NASA, asteroids are left over from the formation of our solar system. Our solar system began about 4.6 billion years ago when a big cloud of gas and dust collapsed. When this happened, most of the material fell to the centre of the cloud and formed the sun. Some of the condensing dust in the cloud became planets.
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