Asteroid Twice As Big As Empire State Building to Fly Past Earth Next Week On 2/23/21 at 8:38 AM EST An asteroid that could be up to two times as wide as the height of the Empire State Building is going to fly past Earth next week—but our planet will be spared a collision. The asteroid, known as 1999 RM45, is going to pass within just 1.8 million miles of Earth at around 7:52pm UTC on Tuesday March 2, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Studies (CNEOS). On an astronomical scale, this distance is tiny. In astronomical units (au)—a measure of distance astronomers use for mapping celestial objects—it is just under 0.02. The Sun is roughly 1 au away.