kqedscience:

Watch Asteroid Flyby Live Today

You can breathe a sigh of relief around lunchtime today, when an asteroid the size of a 15-story building passes close to Earth. The encounter will be the closest ever recorded by scientists for a rock of this size.

The asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, will come within 17,000 miles of the planet. That’s much closer than the moon and even inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communication satellites. Today at 11:24am PST, it will whiz by at roughly eight times the speed of a bullet.

It won’t be dark enough to see the asteroid from California during the day, but here’s how to watch it.

• NASA will stream a feed of the asteroid from a telescope at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama from 6pm to 9pm PST.
• See it through the telescope at Chabot Space & Science Center beginning at 7:30pm (weather permitting).
• Watch below beginning at 11am PST Friday

Good thing that it will only pass by. If it hit us … well … watch.

And that’s just a meteorite.