A dead comet resembling a human skull zipped past Earth on Saturday, spooking NASA scientists who didn't see it coming until three weeks ago.

NASA said Asteroid TB135 -- which is actually a comet which has shed its gas and dust -- zoomed past at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday at 78,000 miles per hour.

 

 

At only 300,000 miles away, or 1.3 times the distance from the Earth to the moon, it's the closest encounter we've had with a large space object since 2006.

It's about 2,000 feet in diameter, about three times the size of the Colosseum in Rome and fairly large for a near-Earth object.

Denton Ebel of the American Museum of Natural History calls it "a spooky thing."

"It wakes us up to fact that we live in a danger zone in the solar system where stuff is flying around all the time and some things hit the planet."

NASA said that since 1998, its near-earth object tracking program has found 90% of objects larger than half a mile.

Watch the report above.

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