An asteroid which is double the size of the huge pyramid of Giza will be zooming past Earth today. The asteroid has been flying down Earth’s orbit for some time now. 

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which is tracking the space object – the asteroid called 465824 (2010 FR) has a diameter between 120 – 270 metres, a report by the Centre of Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has stated.

Although the Asteroid is massive – twice the size of the Pyramid of Giza, NASA in a tweet has stated that the “asteroid 2010 FR…has zero chance of hitting Earth”.

“Our Planetary Defense experts are not worried about asteroid 2010 FR and you shouldn’t be either because it has zero chance of hitting Earth. It will safely pass by our planet on Sept. 6 more than 4.6 million miles away that’s more than 19 times the distance of our Moon!,” the tweet stated.

According to the Virtual Telescope report, “The potentially hazardous asteroid (465824) 2010 FR will have a relatively close and absolutely safe encounter with our planet. It will come as close as 7.5 millions of km, so about 19 times the average lunar distance. We captured it a few hours ago. The image comes from a single 480-seconds exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope carefully tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars result in long trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the centre of the image. It is marked by an arrow. The full Moon was not far in the sky, so the image was taken under less-than-ideal conditions: despite this, asteroid 2010 FR is well visible.

At the imaging time, asteroid (465824) 2010 FR was at about 7.8 millions of km from the Earth and it was slowly approaching us. It was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on 18 Mar. 2010.

This 120 -270 meters large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (about 7.5 millions of km) from us on 6 Sept. 2020, at 08:38 UTC. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.”