Large Hazardous Asteroid Passing by Earth on Tuesday

Astronomers are tracking a large and “potentially hazardous” Asteroid set to make a relatively close pass by the Earth on Tuesday. The, called 7482 (1994 PC1), is expected to fly by our planet around 4:51 p.m. ET, at about five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

With a diameter of roughly 3,451 feet, 1994 PC1 is larger than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and more than twice the size of the Empire State Building in New York City.  It’s also fast and will be traveling at a speed of roughly 45,000 mph when it passes by Earth on Tuesday.

NASA’s “eyes are currently tracking it on an Asteroid” website. You can also watch it on the Virtual Telescope Project’s live stream, which is set to start at 3:00 p.m. ET. 1994 PC1 was discovered in 1994 at the Siding Spring observatory in Australia by astronomer Robert McNaught. After the pass on Tuesday, the Asteroid won’t come as close to the Earth for another two centuries. NASA described 7482 (1994 PC1) as “bridge size.”While the is unlikely to be visible today with the naked eye, amateur astronomers with a small telescope should be able to spot it.

In September this year, a NASA spacecraft will deliberately crash into an Asteroid to change its motion in space — testing technology developed to deflect an hit. The DART mission, or the Double Redirection Test, the spacecraft is aiming for Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth Asteroid Didymos.