Halloween Asteroid To Fly By Earth Today, Catch It Live Online - A huge asteroid the size of the football stadium will have a close encounter with Earth today. NASA scientists have nicknamed asteroid a cosmic "Great Pumpkin" to celebrate the eerie holiday flyby.

The newfound asteroid 2015 TB145 will fly past Earth 1:01 p.m. EDT (1701 GMT) at a safe range of about 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers), just beyond the orbit of the moon.

Today at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), the online Slooh Community Observatory will broadcast a free live webcast of asteroid 2015 TB145 to discuss the asteroid's flyby, the "dangers of near-Earth asteroids, the potential fallout of an asteroid this size impacting the Earth or moon and try to understand why it took so long to discover," as per a Slooh statement. To watch this broadcast live, go to Slooh.com to join. You can also catch the asteroid flyby webcast on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.

NASA scientists have been monitoring asteroid 2015 TB145 with optical telescopes and radar tools since the space rock was discovered on Oct. 10 by astronomers using the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope.

Till now, observations on Friday (Oct. 30) using the Planetary Radar Group at the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have shown that the asteroid is about 1,968.5 feet (600 meters) wide, "which is larger than expected," as per a statement from the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which runs the observatory.

In addition to the Arecibo Observatory, NASA scientists will make use of the agency's Goldstone Solar System Radar antenna in Goldstone, California to catch asteroid 2015 TB145.