A massive asteroid, more than twice the size of the Empire State Building in New York, will come within 1.2 million miles of the Earth next month, according to NASA.
The space rock, called 7482 (1994 PC1), poses no threat to the Earth as it will be five times further away from the planet than the Moon, as it shoots by at 43,000 mph.
According to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) it is a 'potentially hazardous object' as it crosses Earth's orbit as it travels around the Sun.
The rock is 3,280ft in diameter, and after its close approach on January 18, 2022, at 16:51 ET (21:51 GMT), it won't be this close to the Earth again until 2105.
It will have a magnitude of 10 when it gets close, putting it out of reach for the naked eye and most binoculars, but should be visible using a back garden telescope.
Asteroid 1994 PC1, which orbits the Sun every 1.5 years, was first discovered in 1994 by astronomer RH McNaught using the Siding observatory in Australia.
The last known approach this close was in 1933, when it was 699,000 miles from the Earth.
Its orbit is very well known, according to astronomers, and varies from 0.9 AU to 1.8 AU, where 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
It is a common stony S-type asteroid, and every close approach gives astronomers the chance to study the surface and learn more about these ancient space rocks.
NASA and other agencies regularly track more than 28,000 known asteroids as they orbit the Sun, and occasionally cross Earth's orbit.
NASA says none of the known asteroids are expected to collide with the Earth at any point in the near future, but there are asteroids whose orbits aren't known.
There are regular close approaches to the Earth, with the next, 2021 YK, coming 118,000 miles of the Earth on January 2, but it will be just 38ft across.
Asteroid 1994 PC1 won't even be the only space rock to make a close approach on January 18 - it will be joined by the 70ft 2021 BA, that will come 2.3 million miles of the planet - or about twice as far away as 1994 PC1.
In an attempt to tackle the threat of asteroids that may one day get a little too close for comfort, NASA formed a planetary defence program, that includes the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, that launched last month.
DART was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and will see the probe crash head first into the surface of an asteroid.
It is heading for the small moonlet asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger companion asteroid called Didymos.
When it gets there it will be intentionally crashing into the asteroid to slightly change its orbit.
While neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, DART's kinetic impact will prove that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and kinetically impact it.
Then, using Earth-based telescopes to measure the effects of the impact on the asteroid system, the mission will enhance modelling and predictive capabilities to help us better prepare for an actual asteroid threat should one ever be discovered.
The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe.
A small nudge 'would add up to a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and the Earth wouldn't be on a collision course,' NASA said.
Scientists constantly search for asteroids and plot their courses to determine whether they could hit the planet.
'Although there isn't a currently known asteroid that's on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,' said Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer.
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