Astronomers are eagerly anticipating a rare cosmic event with the flyby of asteroid 2005 YU55 on Nov. 8. The huge space rock is expected to safely miss the Earth, but just what if it hit the planet? It would cause earthquakes and tsunamis, a scientist said.

A U.S. researcher has made estimations on what would happen in the remote event that 2005 YU55, which is as big as an aircraft carrier, fell into a collision with our planet.

According to Jay Melosh, a Purdue University asteroid impact expert, if an object of similar size collides with Earth it would result in a 4,000-megaton blast, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake and, if it struck in the deep ocean, 70-foot-high tsunami waves 60 miles from where the splashdown will happen.

But he notes that the scenario is very unlikely.

"Impacts from asteroids of this size are very rare," said Melosh. "They occur about once every 100,000 years, so the chances of an actual collision with an asteroid like YU55 is about 1 percent in the next thousand years."

The asteriod is expected to zoom by the Earth inside the orbit of the moon and is expected to pass within 201,700 miles or 325 kilometers of Earth at 6:28 p.m. EDT (2228 GMT) next Tuesday.

An extensive campaign of radar, visual and infrared observations are being prepared by observers, including the powerful Goldstone Observatory radio dishes in Mojave, Calif., the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

According to NASA, the asteroid's near-Earth flyby is the first since 1976 that astronomers have known about in advance for such a large object; the next known flyby with a big space rock will occur in 2028.