Watch a fortune fly by! £30trillion asteroid to pass close to Earth on Sunday night

IT sounds like a job for Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis’s Armageddon drilling team.

An asteroid that would be worth a potential £3trillion is set to pass tantalisingly close to Earth on Sunday night.

Asteroid UW-158 is thought to have a 90 million tonne core of platinum – which would be worth a staggering sum if harnessed.

But for now we will have to content ourselves with just witnessing the celestial body.

Amateur astronomers will be able to take a good look at the asteroid as it passes by at 30 times closer than the nearest planet at around 10pm,.

Slooh, a project which links telescopes to the internet for public use, will be broadcasting images from an observatory in the Canary Islands, the Daily Mirror reports

Astronomer Bob Berman said: ‘It’s always fun when an asteroid whooshes past our world so the Slooh telescopes will be watching live when asteroid 2011 UW-158 passes 30 times closer to us than the nearest planet, on July 19.

'What makes this unusual is the large amount of platinum believed to be lurking in the body of this space visitor. Can it be mined someday, perhaps not too far in the future?’

UW-158 is classed as an 'X-type’ asteroid by prospecting company Planetary Resources, which yesterday launched its first demonstration vehicle from the International Space Station to test technologies for mining asteroids.

It has already tracked dozens of asteroids similar to UW-158 which have the potential for mining.

Peter H. Diamandis, the co-founder of Planetary Resources, said: 'The successful deployment of the A3R is a significant milestone for Planetary Resources as we forge a path toward prospecting resource-rich asteroids.

'Our team is developing the technology that will enable humanity to create an off-planet economy that will fundamentally change the way we live on Earth.’

Picture courtesy of Rex Features