Another Near Earth Asteroid Hurtles Past Earth; NASA

A tiny asteroid, nearly six times closer than the moon, passed safely by the Earth making it the third asteroid to be spotted in a span of two days.

The 25-feet space rock, 2014 EC, was discovered on March 5 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tuscon, Ariz. During its fly by it came within 38,300 miles of our planet at 4.21 p.m. EST.  As it was four and five Earth-diameters away it was impossible to view the space rock with the naked eye.

The distance at which the asteroid approached the Earth is not unusual, though it came closer than the larger asteroid that zoomed past Earth on March 5, Wednesday afternoon.

"This is not an unusual event," said Paul Chodas, a senior scientist in the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Objects of this size pass this close to the Earth several times every year."

The massive 100-feet asteroid 2014 DX110 flashed within 350,000 kilometers of our home planet.

NASA wrote in a statement stating, "A third asteroid, 2014 EF, which is closer in size to today's 2014 EC, passed Earth at about 7 p.m. PST (10 p.m. EST) Wednesday, with closest approach about twice as far from Earth as 2014 EC's closest approach."

A NBC News report said that the third asteroid, 2014 EC, was half as wide as the Russian asteroid that exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013. Despite the close fly by, none of the asteroids posed any threat to the inhabitants.

With the help of both ground and space based telescopes, the space agency detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids as well as comets.