Eiffel Tower-Sized Asteroid due to Soar Past Earth Next Week

A massive 1,312-foot asteroid is forecast to sail past the Earth in a relatively close encounter on April 26.

The asteroid, named 2006 HV5, will pass our planet at speeds of around 38,922 mph, according to close-approach data from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). That is some 22 times the speed of a bullet.

The asteroid also measures around 1,300 feet in diameter. The Eiffel Tower, for comparison, is just under 1,100 feet tall.

2006 HV5 will pass the Earth at 6.3 lunar distances, or 6.3 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This equates to around 1.5 million miles, which may seem extremely far, but is a close fly-by in space terms. Our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, only reaches 38 million miles away from us at its closest point.

Asteroids are small chunks of rock left over from the formation of the solar system billions of years ago. The majority of asteroids are found within the asteroid belt.

"Asteroids are 'bits of a planet that didn't happen' that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt. However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets," Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.

Asteroids come in a vast range of shapes and sizes, with the smallest measuring only around 30 feet, and the largest being hundreds of miles across. The largest asteroids in our solar system are Ceres, which has a diameter of 587 miles, and Vesta, which measures around 329 miles across.

Asteroids leave their belt and fly past the Earth and other planets for a number of reasons.

"We believe they formed in the asteroid belt and got ejected by impact (in this case the asteroid is a fragment of the large impacted asteroid), or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek in October.

2006 HV5 is one of more than 31,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that scientists have identified to date. NEOs are defined as astronomical bodies that pass within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit, but also contain a subcategory called "potentially hazardous objects," which are defined as coming within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit and also measuring greater than 460 feet in diameter.

There are around 2,300 potentially hazardous objects that have been identified by NASA so far.

"The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, previously told Newsweek.

Asteroids are often spotted just days before they're due to pass close to the Earth, but this is actually due to us getting better at spotting even smaller objects rather than missing larger ones.

"The increase we see in the detection rate of small asteroids is mainly due to our improving capabilities to spot small objects," Gianluca Masi, an astronomer with the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP), told Newsweek in March. "Hopefully, this rate will increase more and more. It is a good thing, it says we are better and better monitoring the sky and keeping safe our planet."

Luckily, it's very unlikely that 2006 HV5 will collide with the Earth, and will continue to soar past us and into the darkness of the rest of the solar system.

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