Asteroid

The asteroid has been dubbed ‘Florence’ and is about 2.7 miles in length – one of the largest that the space agency has ever detected and the largest to ever fly past Earth without hitting it.

It will skim past Earth on September

Florence will fly by at a relatively safe distance of 4.4 million miles away – around 18 times the distance between the Earth and the moon – but still close enough to be classed as a ‘near-Earth object’.

The asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs was around six miles in length, it is believed.

Propulsion Laboratory, said: “While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller.

“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”

The asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs was around six miles long
18 thousand asteroids spotted from Earth in the last year
Due to its massive size, boffins at the space agency believe that it is an ideal candidate to test out new asteroid observation technologies.

Using new Earth-based radars, Nasa says that it can capture surface details on the giant asteroid that would be as small as 10 metres.

The first asteroid was Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system. Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

There are Millions of Asteroids in the solar system, usually found in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, however those in that pass the Earth are called Near-Earth objects
There are Millions of Asteroids in the solar system, usually found in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, however those in that pass the Earth are called Near-Earth objects
There are Millions of Asteroids in the solar system, usually found in the Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, however those in that pass the Earth are called Near-Earth objects
Asteroids are small, rocky bodies that orbit the sun
Asteroids are often called minor planets or planetoids because they are smaller then planets and even the moon
A small piece of asteroid (meteoroid) the size of a car falls into Earth’s atmosphere about once a year
Football pitch size craters are left on the Earth every 2,000 years
Some asteroids have moons of their own
As an meteoroid travels through the Earth’s atmosphere it creates a fireball that eventually burns out before reaching the ground
Nasa explained in a statement: “When these small, natural remnants of the formation of the solar system pass relatively close to Earth, deep space radar is a powerful technique for studying their sizes, shapes, rotation, surface features and roughness, and for more precise determination of their orbital path.”