Asteroid The Size Of The Statue Of Liberty Could Hit Earth In 2017, Experts Warn

Scientists estimate Asteroid 2012 TC4 is around 40-metres wide and could cause even more chaos than the one which hospitalized more than a thousand of people when it exploded over Russia.

Don’t panic yet because there is a slim chance it will hit the planet.

“It has a 0.00055% cumulative chance that it will hit,” said Dr. Györgyey-Ries.

But if it does hit, it could explode in our atmosphere with a force greater than the meteor which injured 1,500 people over Chelyabinsk in Russia in February 2013.

“We could see an airburst maybe broken windows, depending on where it hits,” added Dr. Györgyey-Ries.

Meanwhile, Detlef Koschny, head of the near-Earth object segment at the European Space Agency, said that there is a one in a million chance that it could hit us.

“The size was estimated from the brightness, but we don’t know the reflectivity. So it could be smaller or larger, assume from 10 to 40 meters,” explained Mr. Koschny. “A 40m iron object would go through the atmosphere and make a crater; a 10m rocky object would hardly be noticed.”

Whatever happens, the giant asteroid is not going to wipe out all life on Earth. It’s fairly small as space rocks go.

A worst-case scenario is an explosion in our atmosphere, and it’s most likely 2012 TC4 will pass us by entirely, as it has done many times before.