UK: On Friday an enormous asteroid is going to fly past Earth in what's being described as a "near miss".
The 1000-metre wide object called '2014-YB35' is travelling at 23,000 miles per hour and will "skim" the Earth.
Before you rush out to complete your bucket list, you might find comfort knowing that the "near-miss" asteroid will be a very, very long way from Earth.
To put it into perspective, there are 238,900 miles between Earth and the Moon. There are 2.8 MILLION miles between Earth and the asteroid when it’s at its closest.
That means the asteroid will be more than eleven times (11.7 to be precise) the distance to the Moon away from Earth.
Worrying about this particular asteroid is like being on the pavement and worrying that you were "nearly run over" by a car driving on the other side of the road.
"It's ridiculous to be worried about this asteroid. Nobody [in the scientific community] is suggesting this one's about to hit the Earth or even get really close," Dr Robert Massey from the Royal Astronomical Society told Mirror Online.
In fact, this asteroid will be more than three-and-a-half times as far away as the last "near miss”, which took place in January.
The 2004 BL86 space rock whizzed past us on January 26. At its closest it it was 745,000 miles away - three times the distance to the Moon. No one died.
Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't be worried about asteroids hitting Earth in general.
"Things do hit Earth from time to time and we should track them and and think about deflection strategies," added Massey.
There are a million asteroids in the solar system with potential to strike Earth, but only 10,000 have been discovered.
If a space rock the size of ‘2014-YB35’ DID hit the Earth, the impact would be devastating - likely enough to wipe out an entire country.
Earth-threatening asteroids on the whole present such a threat that astrophysicists and Queen guitarist Brian May has said the human race is "living on borrowed time".
