It came closer ... closer ... and then it started heading away. But you may not have noticed at all.
An asteroid passed relatively close to Earth around 2:24 p.m. ET Friday. As scientists had been predicting all week, it did not hit.
A different and unrelated small asteroid entered the atmosphere over Russia on Friday, hours before the much larger asteroid's fly-by, injuring about 1,000 people. Scientists say that incident was a pure coincidence.
The larger asteroid, called 2012 DA14, never got closer than 17,100 miles to our planet's surface.
Stargazers in Australia, Asia and Eastern Europe could see the asteroid with the aid of a telescope or binoculars. At the Gingin Observatory in Australia, the asteroid appeared as a bright white streak as viewers watched a live NASA video feed.
Scientists are studying this asteroid so extensively that they can already predict its path for most of the 21st century, said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near Earth Object team.
But it is only one of thousands of objects that are destined to one day enter our neighborhood in space.
"There are lots of asteroids that we're watching that we haven't yet ruled out an Earth impact (for), but all of them have an impact probability that is very, very low," Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a press briefing.
The long and short of it
The asteroid is thought to be 45 meters -- about half a football field -- long. Current estimates suggest that the Russian meteor -- which was a tiny asteroid before it hit the Earth's atmosphere -- was only 15 meters wide, making it much harder to detect.