Two asteroids will fly past Earth Friday and Saturday including one that's almost the size of the world's tallest building, but astronomers say neither is a threat to hit the planet.
Asteroid 2010 C01 will pass Earth at 11:42 p.m. EDT Friday. NASA says it's about 400 to 850 feet in diameter.
The other one is getting a lot of buzz because of how massive it is. Asteroid 2000 QW7 will pass by at 7:54 a.m. EDT. It is 950 to 2,100 feet in diameter. That's nearly the size of the Burj Khalifa (2,712 feet) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Both will pass at about 3.5 million miles from Earth, which is well beyond the orbit of the moon.
“These asteroids have been well observed -- once since 2000 and the other since 2010 -- and their orbits are very well known,” Lindley Johnson program executive for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, said in a statement.
These asteroids are considered Near-Earth objects (NEOs). Those are asteroids and comets that orbit the sun but also come within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. NASA says it has discovered more than 20,000 NEOs with an average of 30 new ones found each week.
