A huge asteroid that is larger than any building on Earth is expected to soar past the planet today.

Called 7482 (1994 PC1), the asteroid is more than a kilometer wide at 3,451ft. Its size means it is bigger than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which, at 2,723ft, is the world's tallest building.

But don't fret - the asteroid doesn't pose any threat to Earth and at its closest will pass more than five times the moon's distance from the planet.

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Robert McNaught discovered asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia on August 9, 1994.

Nasa’s Asteroid Watch Twitter account posted: “Near-Earth #asteroid 1994 PC1 (~1 km wide) is very well known and has been studied for decades by our #PlanetaryDefense experts.

"Rest assured, 1994 PC1 will safely fly past our planet 1.2 million miles away next Tues, Jan 18."

The agency's Planetary Defence Coordination Office monitors the skies to find, track, and monitor near-Earth objects.

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NASA is also looking at ways to intercept potentially hazardous asteroids with its double asteroid redirection test (Dart) mission.

The mission aims to prove a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it, smashing it off course.

"NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood," said NASA.

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NASA continued: "Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

"The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due largely to their status as the relatively unchanged remnant debris from the solar system formation process some 4.6 billion years ago."

According to publicly available NASA data, there have been 27,948 NEOs discovered, as of Tuesday, January 18.

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It is estimated that there are about 25,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 460ft. And there are also an estimated 1,000 NEOs larger than 3,280ft , highlighting the need to keep track of these space rocks.

On average, Earth is hit by a soccer pitch-sized rock every 5,000 years, and a civilization-ending asteroid every one million years, according to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program.

Featured image credit: Zoonar GmbH / Alamy

Giant asteroid larger than the world’s tallest building to zoom past earth today, NASA says