We have good news for the ones that were already imagining Armageddon-like scenarios. The visiting Asteroid 2007 TU24 will travel relatively close to Earth tonight, but it will not hit our planet. However, the space object will offer a rare opportunity for both scientists and amateurs.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 is a relatively small asteroid, as it is somewhere between 500 feet (150 meters) and 2,000 feet (610 meters) long and it has been first seen in October 2007. Space scientists said that on Tuesday night at 3:33 a.m., it would pass Earth outside the Moon’s orbit at a distance of about 334,000 miles (537,500 km). So, there is no chance Asteroid 2007 TU24 could hit our planet.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 is just one of an estimated number of 7,000 so-called near-Earth objects. Space objects similar to TU24 frequently pass near our planet, but such advance notice as with TU24 is quite rare. Still, astronomers don’t know anything about it, as Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico admitted in a statement.

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before. […] We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there," Mike Nolan also said.