The bad news: an asteroid is coming REALLY CLOSE to Earth. The good news: we're not in any real danger from it, and you can actually watch its travels online, live! 

This, of course, isn't the first time that an asteroid has come so close to Earth: according to The Daily Mail, Asteroid 2000 EM26 glided past the Earth last month, and that caused just as much of a stir as this successor. This nearly 100-foot asteroid that's coming by this month can be seen beginning at 4:30 p.m. EST, and you can click THIS LINK to see it live. 

But that doesn't mean that just because we're safe from this asteroid, that we're safe from every asteroid. "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," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement.

In addition, according Gizmodo, NASA is only able to predict the "gloom and doom" (or not) with its current capabilities. It's entirely possible that their capabilities may miss more than a few asteroids... including the asteroid that exploded over Russia last year, without any prior warning. 

Indeed, NASA's own website mentions its shortcomings: "NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets using both ground- and space-based telescopes. 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."

Asteroids -- including this one that we'll be able to see tonight -- are minor planets, especially those of the inner Solar System. The larger ones have also been called planetoids. These terms have historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not show the disk of a planet and was not observed to have the characteristics of an active comet, but as minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered, their volatile-based surfaces were found to resemble comets more closely and so were often distinguished from traditional asteroids.