NASA Warns of Huge Asteroid Heading Towards Earth

jpnn.com, JAKARTA - A massive asteroid, comparable in size to the tallest building on Earth, is heading for the planet in mid-December, NASA's asteroid tracker has noted.

Referred to as 163899 (2003 SD220), this massive asteroid has a diameter of about 791 meters, nearly half a mile in length. It is almost the size of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest man-made building on Earth.

However, observations made in 2015 by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico showed that it could be much larger, at least 2 kilometers in length, with observers comparing its shape to that of a sweet potato.

NASA then came up with a different measurement, about 1.6 kilometers away, and compared its shape to that of a hippopotamus.

The asteroid will fly past the Earth on December 17 within about 5.4 million kilometers from the planet at a speed of 5.6 km/s.

In comparison, the distance between Earth and the Moon is much closer than that -- about 385,000 km. Thus, although it is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) due to its size and proximity to Earth, it does not appear to pose a threat to the planet.

In fact, NASA has declared the Earth safe from asteroid impacts for the next 100 years.

This asteroid belongs to the Aten class, meaning that its orbit crosses the Earth's orbit around the Sun but spends most of its time in it.