An asteroid as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge is long will hurtle past Earth next month. But although it will be the biggest and speediest asteroid to fly by our planet this year, there's no reason to panic, Live Science reports.
The space rock, officially called 231937 (2001 FO32), is about 0.5 to 1 mile (0.8 to 1.7 kilometers) in diameter and will come within 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) of Earth at 11:03 a.m. EST (1603 GMT) on March 21 — close enough and large enough to be classified as "potentially hazardous," according to a database published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
An asteroid is designated as "potentially hazardous" when its orbit intersects with Earth's at a distance of no more than about 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) and it is bigger than about 500 feet (140 meters) in diameter, according to NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).