Giant asteroid could be on course to hit Earth

An international team including NASA experts warned a 560m wide space rock has been discovered heading this way.

If it did hit Earth it would blast a crater several miles wide and could devastate a city the size of London, wreaking death and destruction for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Anyone concerned by the warning has one thing to be thankful for — if it does hit it is most likely to happen in 2182.

That gives scientists 172 years to work out how to deal with it.

The asteroid was discovered in 1999 and is dubbed 1999 RQ36.

The scientists had labelled it a "potentially hazardous asteroid" of the Apollo group because its orbit brings it close to Earth.

But it was then considered a much lower risk.

Now scientists from Spain, Italy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have used computer models to produce a more accurate forecast of its path.

Their results are published in the science journal Icarus.

Read more in The Sun...