Asteroid the size of 10 buses to skim past Earth today

Nasa is tracking a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that is set to pass Earth today, according to a report in The Independent.

The gigantic space rock, named 2013 WV44, is larger than 10 buses and is moving at a speed 11.8 km per second roughly 34 times the speed of sound.

The asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth at 9 am BST (1.30 pm IST) on June 28, according to information provided by  NASA.

The US space agency’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies estimates the asteroid will pass within 3.3 million kilometres of Earth, which is relatively close in terms of celestial objects but poses no threat to Earth.

Although this distance is around nine times farther than our Moon, it still earns the asteroid the classification of a near-Earth object (NEO).

NEOs, which can be comets or asteroids, are celestial bodies that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that bring them into the Earth’s neighbourhood. They mainly consist of water ice with embedded dust particles. Most of them are the remnants from the solar system formation process about 4.6 billion years ago.