You can watch live as a giant asteroid safely flies past our planet today (January 18).
Italy's virtual telescope project, based in Rome, will host a livestream starting at 15:00 EST (2000 GMT), when asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) is almost approaching our planet: 1 million miles or 1.6 million kilometers, closer than it will be in at least 200 years, according to EarthSky.
"The Virtual Telescope Project will show it live online, right at the moment when it will peak in brightness," stated the livestream page, written by the project's founder Gianluca Masi.
The small world's closest approach will be at. 16:51 EST (2151 GMT), according to a table from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), conducted by NASA at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The distance is fairly safe, as the 3,400-foot (1-kilometer) asteroid will not get closer than 5 lunar distances during its nearest approach, NASA says. The average distance from Earth to the moon, 1 lunar distance, is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km).
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Any asteroid or comet (which can be very loosely defined as ice-cold space rocks followed by a tail) that comes within 1.3 astronomical units (120.9 million miles or 194.5 million km) qualifies as objects near Earth ( NEOs), says NASA.
The agency is working to fulfill a congressional mandate to search and report at least 90 percent of all NEOs 460 feet (140 meters) and larger, and plans to launch a dedicated mission into space by 2026, called the NEO Surveyor. The mission was to achieve this goal by 2036; NASA had originally hoped to complete the work by 2020.
NASA, however, has a network of partner telescopes in space and on Earth constantly on the hunt for NEOs, directing the efforts of the potentially dangerous through the agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
Although we have no imminent threat to worry about yet, NASA continues to conduct research for safety's sake. An example is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which will attempt to change the path of an asteroid's moon in the fall of 2022.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.