A giant asteroid thought to be nearly as large as the Empire State Building in New York will be making a close approach to Earth next week, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have announced. The imposing space rock is estimated to be up to 1,410 feet wide and will swing by Earth on Tuesday, September 24, missing the planet by a few million miles.
Known as asteroid 523934 (1998 FF14), the formidable space rock has been on NASA's radar, so to speak, for a very long time. As its name suggests, the rock was discovered more than two decades ago and has been attentively monitored by the JPL ever since.
According to British media outlet Express, the massive rock was first spotted in 1998 by asteroid trackers at NASA's Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) near Socorro, New Mexico. Due to its mammoth proportions, the gigantic asteroid was immediately flagged as potentially dangerous and was classified as a near-Earth object (NEO), specifically an Apollo-type asteroid.
As The Inquisitr previously reported, NASA labels as "potentially hazardous" all asteroids that go over 460 feet in diameter and follow an orbital path which brings them within 4.66 million miles of Earth's orbit. And, based on JPL data, asteroid 1998 FF14 will approach a lot closer than that when it shoots past Earth on Tuesday.