Asteroid set to zoom past Earth in September has a 1-in-7000 chance of hitting us

The European Space Agency (ESA) is tracking an asteroid that’s set to zoom past planet Earth in September.

And the smart space folk say there’s only around a 1-in-7000 chance that the massive chunk of rock will collide with us.

Asteroid 2006 QV89 measures 40 meters in diameter and it’ll almost certainly fly harmlessly past at a distance of 4.2 million miles away on September 9.

But it’s close enough to us that the ESA has included it on the ominously-named ‘Risk List’. The space agency describes the list as ‘a catalogue of all objects for which a non-zero impact probability has been detected.’ Which is jargon for: there’s a miniscule chance this could wipe out all life on our planet.

We’re exaggerating. In fact, at 40 meters wide, it’s unlikely an impact would wipe out the population. But it would be more powerful than the largest meteor strike yet recorded.

In 2013, a 20 meter asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia. The impact had the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs and the shockwave damaged 7,200 buildings. Over 1,500 people were injured – a number that would have been much higher if the area was more densely populated.

Nasa, meanwhile, doesn’t take any chances when it comes to asteroids. The US space agency classifies any rock that comes within 30 million miles of our planet as a ‘Near-Earth Object’.

Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine warned that large asteroid impacts are a very real threat to our planet.

‘These events are not rare. They happen,’ he said. ‘The fact is that we’ve had three such events in the last 100 years,’ he said.

In 1908, 80 million trees were knocked down over an area of 800 square miles hidden deep in the Siberian forest when a meteor which was up to 190 metres wide crashed into Earth. If the object which caused this devastation had hit a populated area, it could have killed millions and razed a city to the ground.

The mysterious ‘Tunguska event’ was the largest asteroid impact in recorded history and caused an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

Thankfully, there’s not any asteroids currently believed to be on a collision course with Earth. So no need to panic.