On September 1, Nasa says that a huge asteroid is set to skim past Earth. The asteroid has been dubbed ‘Florence’ and experts believe that it is about 2.7 miles in length and is one of the largest that the space agency has ever detected and the largest to ever fly past Earth without hitting it. For reference, the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs was around six miles in length, it is believed. Florence will fly by at a relatively safe distance of 4.4 million miles away – around 18 times the distance between the Earth and the moon – but still close enough to be classed as a ‘near-Earth object’. The asteroid is 2.7 miles in length Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller. “Florence is the largest asteroid to pass b...