A massive asteroid being tracked by experts at NASA is just days away from crashing into Earth's orbit.
The more than 1km-wide beastly asteroid, named 199145 (2005 YY128), has been classed as a near-Earth object, and will potentially crash into Earth's orbit next week.
This asteroid is estimated to measure between 1,870 and 4,265 feet across, making it wider than the famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, United States.
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It will come around 2.8 million miles towards Earth on February 16, with NASA not yet confident enough to comment on if it will actually crash into Earth's orbit and cause any damage to the planet.
It comes just two weeks after another sizeable asteroid scraped past the planet in one of the closest encounters ever recorded – but failed to make impact in any way.
Asteroid 2023 BU was only discovered on January 21 and came just 2,200 miles away from the Earth's surface, whizzing over the southern tip of South America at around 12.30am on January 27.
This means it came 10 times closer than the world's telecommunications satellites, which sit inside an arc 22,000 miles above us.
The distance is roughly equal to that of London to Cyprus.
It makes the space rock the fourth-nearest of 35,000 past and future Earth approaches, according to data collected by NASA's Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) for the 300 years from 1900 to 2200.
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Fortunately, space boffins confirmed last week there was no chance the asteroid would hit Earth.
With an estimated size of 3.5m to 8.5m across (11.5ft to 28ft), it would be no threat regardless of its trajectory.
NASA states asteroids smaller than 82ft (25m) across will most likely burn up when they enter Earth's atmosphere, leading to little or no damage on the ground – but this new beast, heading towards us, is far, far bigger than that.
Brace yourselves…
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