Small Asteroid May Hit Earth Before Election Day, Neil deGrasse Tyson Says

As Americans prepare to cast their votes on Earth, an asteroid is making its way towards it just a day before Election Day.

Celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson has warned his followers in an Instagram post about a Near-Earth Asteroid possibly hitting Earth on Nov. 2. In his post, Tyson said a refrigerator-sized NEA, known as 2018VP1, is making its way towards the planet at 25,000 mph.

The said NEA is currently included in the European Space Agency's Risk List. However, the size of the asteroid is not big enough to cause any harm to Earth, noted the famed astrophysicist.

"It’s not big enough to cause harm. So if the World ends in 2020, it won’t be the fault of the Universe," Tyson humorously concluded.

Scheduled to meet the planet at 7:33 a.m. EDT on Nov. 2 (Monday), the NEA could get as close as 7,688.04 kilometers from the Earth's surface, according to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies' (CNEOS) Close Approach Data Table. 2018VP1 could get as big as 12 feet in diameter -- a size still relatively small to pose significant harm to Earth.

The renowned scientist isn't the only one reassuring people about the NEA's close approach. According to a tweet from NASA's Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch), 2018VP1 only has a 0.41% chance of entering the Earth's atmosphere, but even if it did, it would only end up disintegrating due to its extremely small size, thus posing no possible threat to the home planet.

2018VP1 is an asteroid first discovered two years ago on Nov. 13. Considered an Apollo asteroid, this NEA has an Earth-crossing orbit, which means that at a certain point, its orbit intersects with that of the Earth's.