Next month an asteroid will pass so close to Earth, we might see it in the sky

NASA has announced that a 30-metre wide asteroid passing Earth on March 5 might come so close that it'll be visible in our sky.

Before you freak out, there's no chance that the asteroid is going to smash into us. The space agency is still determining its exact trajectory, but at the closest estimate, it'll be 18,000 km (11,000 miles) away as it passes us by - which would make it easily viewable with the help of a telescope. To put that into perspective, that's roughly one-twentieth the distance from Earth to the Moon.

NASA Uses New Method to Estimate Earth Mass Movements

NASA and European researchers have conducted a novel study to simultaneously measure, for the first time, trends in how water is transported across Earth's surface and how the solid Earth responds to the retreat of glaciers following the last major Ice Age, including the shifting of Earth's center of mass.

Crawler-transporter

The crawler-transporters are a pair of tracked vehicles used to transport spacecraft from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) along the Crawlerway to Launch Complex 39. They were originally used to transport the Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets during the Apollo, Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz programs. They were then used to transport Space Shuttles from 1981 to 2011. The crawler-transporters carry vehicles on the Mobile Launcher Platform, and after each launch return to the pad to take the platform back to the VAB.

Journey to Mars... via virtual reality

The year 2016 is set to be a big one for virtual reality, with the likes of Oculus, HTC, and Sony all releasing VR headsets over the next 12 months. And for the early adopters, there's a new VR experience on the way that's designed to give you a taste of what life would be like on the Red Planet.

The Mars 2030 Experience is a collaboration between NASA, digital news outlet Fusion, and MIT's Space Systems Laboratory, and as Fortune reports, it's going to debut in March at the South by Southwest event in Texas. As well as working with the headsets mentioned above, it's going to be compatible with the cheaper Gear VR from Samsung and DIY kits based on Google Cardboard.