Giant asteroid ‘as tall as 24 emus’ set to crash into Earth’s orbit on Wednesday

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    An asteroid the size of 24 emus is set to crash into Earth's orbit tomorrow (March 29).

    Given the name 2022 YK4, the asteroid measures in at around 42 metres in diametre, which we've worked out as being the same as 24 average-sized emus standing on top of each other.

    And it will fly just 4,495,416.015 kilometres from Earth – which has worried NASA's top boffins enough to designate it as a near-Earth object.

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    The asteroid was first spotted in 2012, and last came near Earth in 2017.

    NASA has it scheduled to come pretty close to us again tomorrow at around 11.33pm.

    The next time it will be seen from our planet is May 2029, and then again in January 2034.

    After that, it will then take a 23 year break, before being spotted again in May 2057.

    On its current projections, it will then come near us again in September 2079, before disappearing into the ether of space for good.

    Given that NASA has discovered that it will make five more trips before going away, it doesn't appear that they are sufficiently worried enough about it actually hitting Earth to start sounding the alarm bells

    They also classified it as an Apollo asteroid, which means it has a semi-major axes larger than the Earth's – basically, it's goes around the Earth and the Sun but at a slightly different way than the Earth.

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    It has not been made clear where over the planet it will pass, however.

    It comes just a few days after one the size of Big Ben slammed through Earth's orbit on Saturday (March 25).

    This one was called 2023 DZ2, and it skimmed the Earth around 107,500 miles away.

    It had been rumoured that – should it dramatically change course – it would have an impact 214 times the 'Fat Man' atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

    It did not, however, come anywhere near us . . . otherwise you probably wouldn't be reading this.

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