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An asteroid the size of a house is set to give Earth a close shave, and you can watch part of the space rock's approach live online this evening (Oct. 11).

By Mike Wall Space.com 10-11-17

The astronomy broadcasting service Slooh will air a webcast at 8 p.m. EDT tonight (0000 GMT on Oct. 12) focused on the space rock 2012 TC4, which will zoom by Earth just a few hours later. You can watch the show directly on Slooh's website. You can also watch the webcast on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.
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A mountain-size space rock cruised past Earth this morning (Sept. 1) in a record-breaking encounter that has long had scientists drooling.

At 8:06 a.m. EDT (1206 GMT) today, the roughly 2.7-mile-wide (4.4 kilometers) asteroid 3122 Florence came within a mere 4.4 million miles (7 million km) of Earth — just 18 times the distance from our planet to the moon.

By Mike Wall Space.com 9-1-17

"Nothing this big has passed this close to Earth since we've been tracking," Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Space.com. "This is a once-in-40-year-event kind of thing."
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A bus-size asteroid that buzzed between the Earth and the moon at 3:25 p.m. EST (2025 GMT) on Thursday (Feb. 2) was spotted by one of the Slooh Community Observatory telescopes in the Canary Islands.

By Calla Cofield space.com 2-4-17

The asteroid, dubbed 2017 BS32, was first identified by the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, on Jan. 30, and came to within half the distance between the Earth and the moon on Feb. 2, according to Slooh. The space rock is between 36 and 82 feet long (11 to 25 meters), and was traveling at a speed of 25,800 mph (42,000 km/h), or about 16 times faster than a bullet shot out of an AK-47 rifle, according to Slooh astronomer Erik Edelman.
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Astronomers were watching when comet P/2016 BA14 flew past Earth on March 22. At the time of its closest approach, the comet was about 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) away, making it the third closest comet flyby in recorded history (see "A 'Tail' of Two Comets"). Radar images from the flyby indicate that the comet is about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) in diameter.

By NASA 3-24-16

The scientists used the Goldstone Solar System Radar in California's Mojave Desert to track the comet. "We were able to obtain very detailed radar images of the comet nucleus over three nights around the time of closest approach," said Shantanu Naidu, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who works with the radar team and led the observations during the comet's flyby. "We can see surface features as small as 8 meters per pixel.

"The radar images show that the comet has an irregular shape: looks like a brick on one side and a pear on the other," Naidu said. "We can see quite a few signatures related to topographic features such as large flat regions, small concavities and ridges on the surface of the nucleus. "

According to the new radar observations, comet P/2016 BA14 appears to spin around its axis once every 35 to 40 hours.

Vishnu Reddy, of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona, also observed comet P/2016 BA14 using the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Data collected (infrared spectra) indicate that the comet reflects less than 3 percent of the sunlight that falls on its surface. Comet nuclei are as dark as fresh asphalt. However, infrared spectra can often yield clues to the makeup of these primitive denizens of the solar system. [...]
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