asteroid is hurtling towards us as we speak, and is set to crash into our orbit this coming week. NASA's tool tracking near-earth asteroids has identified an absolute whooper which is more than 12 times larger than Big Ben.
Asteroid 138971 will make its close-earth approach on March 5 (this coming Friday) and is so large that it is just one of two asteroids being tracked by the space agency to have been assigned a specific number.
The second largest asteroid being tracked by NASA is a mere 152m, almost eight times smaller than this absolute beast. If it were to crash into earth the asteroid could cause an extinction level event, but luckily 138971 will be passing us by.
NASA say that it should come just under five million kilometres away from us, which is still extremely narrow in space terms.
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