Asteroid 2000 EM26 is nearly 900 feet across, whizzing through space at 27,000 miles per hour, and will barely miss our planet on Monday.
The near-miss will be simulcast online, beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard time, here. Viewers can watch live images, broadcast from the Slooh Space Camera. Members of the public are also encouraged to participate in a live commentary from astronomer Mark Boslough, using Twitter hashtag #asteroid.
Current predictions say 2000 EM26 will pass within 2.1 million miles of our planet. This is about 8.8 times further away than the Moon. This may seem like quite a distance to people on Earth, but it is quite close in astronomical terms. Still, there is no chance at all of the asteroid hitting our world.
Almost exactly one year ago, on 15 February 2013, astronomers had their eyes set on another flyby - asteroid 2012 DA14. Suddenly, a meteor, 65 feet across, exploded 18 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring more than 1,000 people.
The event was 20 times more powerful than the atomic bombs which ended the Second World War. If Asteroid 2000 EM26 were to strike the Earth, the effect would be many times greater.
"We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids - sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth. We need to find them before they find us!" Paul Cox, Slooh's technical and research director, said in a statement.
While 2000 EM26 poses no risk to Earth this time around, it is still officially classified as potentially hazardous. Astronomers say this asteroid should pose as a warning about the dangers that can suddenly strike from space.
The Slooh observatory consists of a pair of telescopes, on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Amateur astronomers using telescopes 12 inches in diameter or greater will also be able to see the asteroid as it passes by Earth.
"On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908, and February 15, 2013. Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us-fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such an Antarctica. But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all NEOs, as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources," Bob Berman, Slooh astronomer, said.
Pieces of the meteorite that struck Russia were awarded to seven gold medal winners in the Sochi Winter Olympics.
