A huge, 1.7-mile-wide asteroid is set to skim past Earth at 5 p.m. in what will be its closest approach for nearly 200 years.
Asteroid 1998 QE2 will come within 3.6 million miles of Earth, which is about 15 times the distance from our planet to the moon.
Luckily for planet Earth, there’s no chance the asteroid will hit us but unluckily for star watchers there’s also no way to see the flying rock with the naked eye because it will be roughly 100 times fainter that the dimmest star observed under clear and dark skies, according to Fox News.
Even though the asteroid won’t be putting on a show, it is an extremely good thing that the rock isn’t going to strike Earth.
Astronomers believe that any asteroid bigger than .6 miles wide could end human civilization. To put that in perspective, the meteorite that hit Russia earlier this year was only 55 feet wide while the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was an estimated 6 miles across.
“It will be fun to actually watch it change position,” said “Astronomy” magazine columnist Bob Berman, who will watch the asteroid at the Slooh Space Telescope and the Virtual Telescope Project.
Asteroid 1998 QE2 was first discovered in 1998 by MIT astronomers and it has been studied ever since. Recently astronomers using NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna learned that the asteroid actually has it’s own 2,000 foot wide mood circling the larger space rock.