Asteroid size of football pitch hurtling towards Earth, says NASA

If you ever want a little dose of existential dread (or indeed a sense of wonder), it's always a good idea to check in with the folks at NASA.

They're constantly watching the skies for interstellar events and, of course, asteroids.

In fact, they have a handy page that keeps a list of the next five asteroids that will approach within a certain distance from Earth - although the majority will still be so far away as to pose next to no risk whatsoever.

Erik Simonsen / Getty

If you check that page pretty often, you'll see a lot of asteroids the size of airplanes in the list, and a few smaller ones, but this week we're getting one that's a good chunk bigger.

Asteroids don't get catchy names, since there are so many of them, and 2008 OS7 is no exception. Still, it's a noteworthy one regardless - if only because it's roughly the size of a football stadium at around 890 feet in diameter.

That's one chunky hunk of rock, but it won't get any closer than 1,770,000 miles away from us and isn't on any sort of collision course. It will pass by Earth on February 2, if you want to keep tabs on it.

Still, the space rock is big enough that it passes the marks required for NASA to label it as a 'potentially hazardous object', which means that if it did hit our planet it could do some noticeable damage.

Despite its decently impressive size, there's very little chance that 2008 OS7 will be visible to the human eye in any way as it passes through its closest point to us, with only way, way bigger asteroids ever having been easily visible without equipment.

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If you're wondering how someone who actually knows what all this means has to say about it, Dr Minjae Kim, Research Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Warwick, said: “2008 OS7, a very small asteroid whose orbit intersects with that of Earth, has been classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA). We don’t need to worry about it too much as this asteroid will not enter Earth’s atmosphere, while this will still approach close to the Earth."

Astronomers are just built different - only they could think that an asteroid the size of a football pitch is "very small", eh?