NASA: The asteroid with diameter nearly as Empire State Building could smash into Earth

A peanut-shaped asteroid the size of the Empire State Building could someday hit Earth, experts have warned NASA.
2015BN509 stone known as Earth approached last week, when flew with incredible speed of 70,500 kilometers per hour.

NASA has labeled the asteroid, which is about 200 meters wide and 400 long, as "potentially dangerous" to Earth.

Empire State Building is 381 meters long, and if an asteroid the size of this building would hit the Earth would have major consequences.

This asteroid is captured flying telescope called Arecibo Observatory.

"An asteroid impact, unlike other natural catastrophes, can actually be avoided."

NASA has an asteroid early warning system called Scout in place. Within 10 minutes of spotting an incoming asteroid it can project potential flight paths.

It alerts three other telescopes to perform follow-up observations and narrow down a rock's trajectory.

"When a telescope first finds a moving object, all you know is it's just a dot, moving on the sky. You have no information about how far away it is," astronomer Paul Chodas from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the Scout program.

Dr Edgard Rivera-Valentín, a planetary scientist with the Universities Space Research Association who studies data from The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, told Business Insider : 'The peanut shape comes from the fact that it is a contact binary where the two parts [of asteroids] could not successfully orbit each other and fell back together.

Arecibo Observatory, which was used as a setting for the James Bond film GoldenEye , is capable of studying size, shape, composition and geology of an asteroid - as well as how it is spinning.

"Arecibo goes beyond acting as a fortune teller, we can characterize these objects," said Dr Rivera-Valentín.