Three-mile-wide asteroid named after ‘destroyer’ God is heading towards Earth A mysterious three-mile-wide asteroid, ominously named Phaethon after a Greek demi-God who nearly destroyed Earth, is going to buzz our planet before Christmas. The object, named 3200 Phaethon will fly past ‘quite close’, Russian astronomers have warned (but don’t worry, there’s no chance it will hit us). Phaethon was a Greek demi-God who borrowed his father, the sun God Helios’s chariot, and nearly burnt the Earth to a cinder, before being killed by Zeus. NASA classifies it as a ‘potentially hazardous asteroid’,
but it will pass 6.4 million miles from Earth on December 17.
