Huge asteroid three times the size of a London bus will travel between Earth and Moon TOMORROW

A massive asteroid three times the size of a London bus will travel just 159,000 miles between Earth and the moon tomorrow, NASA has revealed.

The 30-meter-long space rock, also referred to as 2021 GT3, will fly past Earth on April 10, making its closest approach to the planet at approximately 10:30 p.m. BST.

NASA says the asteroid will not pose a direct threat to life on Earth because it will be too far away at the closest point to collide with the planet.

The space rock, flying between Earth and Moon at 54,000 miles per hour, will be too dim to see with anything other than the largest professional telescopes.

It has an absolute magnification of 26, making it invisible to even larger backyard telescopes, which usually see up to about 15 magnitude in a clear sky.

It will be 159,000 miles from Earth at the closest approach – for comparison, Earth is about 238,900 miles from the Moon.

The object’s orbit takes it from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, closer to the sun than Mercury and back to the asteroid belt.

During its journey around the sun, the space rock crosses the orbital path of Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury, making it a potential collision for all of them, although in this orbit Earth is the only planet it will be close to.

The space rock was first discovered on April 6 and orbits the sun every 650 days.

GT3 is classified as a Near Earth Object (NEO) and poses a potential risk to Earth, but any object that comes within 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Sun is also a NEO.

‘Most NEOs pose no danger at all. It’s the small percentage of potentially dangerous asteroids that are getting extra attention, ” said NASA in its Asteroid Watch article.

“These objects are defined as objects approaching Earth less than half the Earth-Sun distance,” and GT3 falls within the potentially dangerous group.

The rock is about the same length as three London route master buses, or, according to the US space agency, about the size of an average house.

It’s the second rock of a similar size to approach up close, with 2021 GT coming 688,000 miles from Earth at 8:11 PM BST tonight, three times farther from Earth than the Moon, according to NASA.

Two other rocks will pass through Earth tomorrow, both larger than GT3, but both will pass millions of miles from the planet.

GB4, a gigantic 60-meter asteroid, will pass three million miles from Earth at approximately 1:00 a.m. BST, followed by GT3 at 10:30 p.m., and then GT1, a 40-foot space rock, covering 4.5 million miles of the earth will pass at about 11:16 pm. BST.

It will be a busy weekend for asteroids flying past Earth, although none come closer than GT3 and most will be millions of miles away, NASA said.

Asteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago, most in orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

Occasionally, asteroids’ orbits are affected by the gravitational pull of planets, changing their paths.

When this happens, it could put them in a potential collision orbit with Earth or other planets, including one that killed dinosaurs 65 million years ago.