An artist's illustration of an asteroid belt.
An asteroid estimated to be 100 feet in diameter will rocket past Earth on Wednesday (Thursday PHL time) at a distance closer than the moon.
But NASA says the space rock poses no danger. The asteroid will still be about 217,000 miles away from Earth when it swings by at around 4 p.m. ET — that's about 22,000 miles closer than the Earth's average distance from the moon.
This space stone is just one of about 20 rocks per year that fly by Earth at a similar distance, according to NASA.
The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them and identifies their close approaches to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet, according to NASA's website.
Source mashable.com
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