On the eve of the   US presidential election on Tuesday , November 3 , a tiny space rock’n’roll will flee close to Earth . There is a luck this low asteroid will   enter our atmosphere but worry not . If the asteroid does enroll   our atmosphere , it   will burn up long before it reaches the earth .

The asteroid , discover in 2018 , is called2018 VP1 . At   roughly 2 meters ( 6.5 feet ) in duration , it   orbits the Sun in two Earth years , which means   it regularly go up our planet . Unfortunately , analyse and predicting its orbit   is difficult due to its lilliputian size . With   this uncertainty in mind , uranologist gauge there ’s   a 1 in 240 chance ( 0.41 percent ) that it will murder our planet .

The token distance between the core of the Earth and 2018 VP1 is 420,000 kilometers ( 260,000 mile ) , which is further than the Moon is from Earth . The maximum possible length is 4   million kilometers ( just shy of 2.5 million naut mi ) . Its closest potential distance is smack right   into the planet ’s ambiance somewhere above the Pacific ocean .

The everlasting disintegration of the asteroid depends on its writing , which is another unknown factor . It ’s potential that   small fragments of 2018 VP1 could   reach the primer . For example , a similar scenario hap with the Sutter ’s milling machinery meteorites in 2012 and the   2014 AA   asteroid , which was pick up a few hours before its demise through the atmosphere .

investigator expect there are hundreds of millions of small , mostly harmless asteroids like 2018 VP1 .   There are certainly larger , more dangerous objects out there and NASA and other space agencies have attempt to get across as many of them   as possible . The American agency ’s goal is to cover the celestial orbit of any penny-pinching - Earth objects ( NEOs ) over 100 meter ( 330 foot ) across .

While all the   civilisation - ending asteroid are believed to be known ,   many celestial organic structure that could   destroy a large city or more are yet to be incur . Up to 6,200 objectsare estimated to be out there butroughly 2,000are currently know .