AN ASTEROID is heading for Earth at an estimated 21,300mph — the night before the hotly contested US presidential election.
The space rock, known as 2018VP1, has a one in 240 chance of striking on November 2, according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The rock is seven feet in diameter and NASA estimates that it weighs about 35,273lbs.
The famed astrophysicist posted a photo of the giant rock hurtling toward Earth, with the caption, “asteroid 2018VP1, a refrigerator-sized space-rock, is hurtling towards us at more than 25,000 mi/hr.”
Neil, who hosts the new Fox show, “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” added: “It may buzz-cut Earth on Nov. 2, the day before the Presidential Election. But it’s not big enough to cause harm.
“So if the World ends in 2020, it won’t be the fault of the Universe.”
VP1 has been on the radar since November 2018 when it was first spotted by the Paloma Observatory in California.
But before you hunker down in your bunker, NASA says the chances of it hitting Earth is about one in 240, or 0.41 per cent.
Should it hit earth it would release an estimated 0.42 kilotons of energy.
That is is 7,500 times smaller than the meteor that was believed to have killed the dinosaurs.
The asteroid will likely come as close as between 4,700 miles and 260,000 miles of Earth, according to
There are three potential impacts, but none are expected to be disastrous based off 21 observations over 13 days.
If it were to hit the atmosphere, the asteroid is so small that it would only look really bright before breaking up into tiny piece.
For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science.
Asteroids still only hit Earth on average every million or few million years, even with the increased crash rate.
NASA’s list of potential major crashes shows no pending major threats.
