Asteroid twice the size of Statue of Liberty shoots past Earth in ‘close approach’

A LARGE asteroid has shot past Earth and reached its closest point on January 24.

Nasa has its eye on the large space rock as it's considered a 'near Earth object'.

It's called Asteroid 2017 XC62 and Nasa thinks it's up to 623 feet wide.

That's over twice the size of the Statue of Liberty.

The giant asteroid shot past Earth at 9,500 miles per hour on Monday.

The good news is it stayed a distance of 4.4 million miles away.

In comparison, the Moon is only about 238,900 miles from us.

The asteroid may seem pretty like it stayed pretty far away but it's actually quite close in terms of space.

Nasa considers anything passing near Earth's orbit a Near-Earth Object (NEO).

Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they're on a collision course with our planet.

Any fast-moving space object that comes within 4.65 million miles is considered to be "potentially hazardous" by cautious space organizations.

One small change to their trajectories could spell disaster for Earth.

Plans to save Earth from asteroids

Some experts are worried that Earth isn't yet ready to defend itself from potentially deadly asteroids.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once sparked concern by tweeting: "a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defence."