'Potentially Hazardous Asteroid' The Size Of A Skyscraper To Pass By Earth

A massive asteroid is barrelling through space at 52,000 miles per hour and will come within 1.5 million miles of the Earth on November 1, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies said.

The asteroid, named 2022 RM4, has a diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet and is 2,716 feet tall. It is classified as an Apollo-type asteroid because it has an orbit bigger than the Earth's orbit around the sun and intersects Earth's orbit at various points along its journey.

It takes 2002 RM4 1,397 days to complete its orbit around the sun.

"What is interesting in the case of this asteroid is simply the fact that it's a very large one, and we recently discovered it, implying that our survey of the large population of near-earth asteroids is not yet fully complete," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek.

While the chances of 2022 RM4 slamming into Earth are slim, NASA considers it a "potentially hazardous asteroid" because of its large size and how close it will come to Earth.

"This asteroid will not hit us. We already have a good measurement of its orbit and know that it will pass nearby us in November 2095 but still at 0.01AU [one percent of the distance from the Earth to the sun]," Marchis said. "Nothing to be worried about."