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Giant Asteroid Safely Zooms By Earth

MIAMI (CBSMiami/CNN) – A giant asteroid, two and half times taller than the Empire State building, zoomed by our planet on Tuesday.

The asteroid is estimated to be a kilometer in diameter, or 3,451 feet.

Unlike the movie Don't Look Up, this asteroid passed within 1.2 million miles of our planet, moving at 47,344 miles per hour, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks potentially hazardous comets and asteroids that could collide with our planet.

The asteroid is known as 7482 (1994 PC1) and it was discovered in 1994, according to NASA.

Nobody expected 7482 (1994 PC1) to hit Earth, but it's the closest an asteroid will come for the next two centuries, according to NASA projections. The flyby happened at 4:51 p.m.

NASA shared the link to track the path of the asteroid. Click here to track it yourself.

It won't be the largest asteroid to ever sweep past Earth. That honor belongs to the asteroid 3122 Florence (1981 ET3), which flew by and missed colliding with Earth on September 1, 2017. That asteroid is estimated to be between 2.5 miles and 5.5 miles wide, and it make another pass again on September 2, 2057.

While 7482 (1994 PC1) is unlikely to be visible with the naked eye, amateur astronomers with a small telescope should be able to spot it, according to the website EarthSky.com.

In September this year, a NASA spacecraft will deliberately crash into an asteroid to change its motion in space -- testing technology developed to deflect an asteroid hit.

Known as the DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, the spacecraft is aiming for Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that place them within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of Earth. Detecting the threat of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that could potentially cause grave harm is a primary focus of NASA and other space organizations around the world.

(©2022 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company, contributed to this report.)

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