Asteroid ‘close encounter with Earth’ set for Friday

A massive asteroid estimated to be 2.7 miles wide is set to make a ‘relatively close encounter’ with Earth on 1 September.

Dubbed ‘Florence,’ the huge space rock will pass just 4.4 million miles from our planet on Friday – or, about 18 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

According to NASA, this is the closest an asteroid of this size has come since they first began tracking near-Earth objects, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study it up close through ground-based radar observations.

The asteroid is large enough to end life as we know it if it hits, but NASA says this won't happen this week, according to the Daily Mail.

It’s not the closest encounter our planet has seen with an NEO, but for this distance, the experts say it is the largest.

“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”

The asteroid, named for Florence Nightingale, was first spotted in 1981, and the flyby in September will be the closest it’s come to Earth since 1890.

It was first discovered in Siding Spring observatory in Australia by asteroid hunter Schelte J Bus on the night of 2 March 1981 and orbits the Sun once every 859 days.

And, it won’t come this close again until 2,500.

A 2016 study found a 0.6-mile-wide (1km) asteroid could trigger a mini ice age if it collided with Earth.

An impact of this size would have a “very severe global impact” for several years and would cause the world to become a much darker, colder and drier place, experts say.