A massive asteroid is set to collide with Earth’s orbit within the next two days and is classed as potentially hazardous by Space bowfins. The terrifying rock – named 2003 SD220 – is a whopping kilometre wide and will return to our planet’s orbit for another close encounter.
It orbits the Sun on a path travelling between Venus and Earth, circling our solar system’s star about once every nine months. Belonging to the Aten group of space objects, it was first discovered back in September 2003 after astronomers spotted it from the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search.
After spotting the terrifying rock from their base at Anderson Mesa Station close to Flagstaff, Arizona, it was classed as potentially hazardous. 2003 SD220 varies in terms of how close it comes to Earth each times it passes, with its closest encounter so far being recorded on December 22 2018. That year the asteroid was roughly 7 lunar distances (1,615,565.1 miles) from our planet, far closer than just three years before when Christmas Day saw it pass at 28 lunar distances from us.
The rock has been earmarked as a possible site for a robotic mission in the future as scientists hope to learn more about the object. It comes just days after a stark warning revealed that an asteroid which is thought to be 10 times bigger than this year’s Rockefeller Christmas tree in New York is on its way to Earth. Though the asteroid is likely to stay four million miles away from our planet, this isn’t actually as far away as it seems.
