Nearly the size of the world's tallest skyscraper, a recently discovered 'potentially hazardous' asteroid will pass by Earth just before Halloween, according to NASA. By cosmic standards, this margin is quite little.

A space object that passes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth is defined by NASA as a 'near-Earth object,' as is any large body that is 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) or closer and is considered 'potentially hazardous.' Once these potential threats have been alerted, astronomers keep a close eye on them, using radar to seek for any signs that their predicted trajectories have changed, which might put them on a lethal collision course with Earth.

The diameter of the asteroid, designated 2022 RM4, is believed to be between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 metres), which is barely below the height of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure at 2,716 ft (828 m), the asteroid's diameter. According to NASA, it will fly by our globe at 68 times the speed of sound, or around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h).

On November 1, the asteroid will be around 1.43 million miles (2.3 million kilometres) from Earth at its closest approach, which is roughly six times the typical distance between Earth and the moon. 

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert Set (ATLAS), a system of four telescopes that can monitor the whole night sky in a single pass once every 24 hours, is used by NASA to track over 28,000 asteroids and identify their positions and orbits. These asteroid bits were fortunately tiny and unharmed.

NASA has computed the anticipated paths of all the near-Earth objects to the end of the century. The good news is that, according to NASA, there is no known threat to Earth from an end-of-the-world asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.