LOS ANGELES - A "potentially hazardous" asteroid the size of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington is going to pass by Earth on Tuesday, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
JPL has an asteroid watch dashboard that tracks all of the giant asteroids that make very close flybys of Earth. The asteroid, named 2021 KT1, which is 600 feet, will pass approximately 4.5 million miles away, which may seem far but NASA defines any potentially hazardous asteroids as anything larger than 500 feet that flies 4.6 million miles away from the planet.
2021 KT1 will make its closest pass by Earth on Tuesday and will slowly float away going into Wednesday and Thursday, according to JPL’s orbit diagram.