The asteroid's upper size estimate is just short of the world's tallest building.
© Science Photo Library - ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI via Getty ImagesAn artist's impression of a near-Earth asteroid.
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The
asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai's 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound.
At its closest approach on Nov. 1, the asteroid will come within about 1.43 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) of
Earth, around six times the average distance between Earth and the
moon. By cosmic standards, this is a very slender margin.
NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a "near-Earth object" and classifies any large body within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet as "potentially hazardous." Once flagged, these potential threats are closely watched by astronomers, who study them with radar for signs of any deviation from their predicted trajectories that could put them on a devastating collision course with Earth.
