Today, asteroid 2015 HM10 will not destroy Earth. It will not arc like a fiery rainbow through the atmosphere and drop an inferno the size of Manhattan onto, let's say, Paris or the Golden Gate Bridge. Billions of people will not die horribly, or indeed at all. No 1990s action heroism will be required.

So if indeed the prosaically-named 2015 HM10 is only coming within 270,000 miles of our planet—further away than the moon—why are so many people freaking right the hell out about it? Why is NASA's Asteroid Watch Twitter feed spending valuable at-replies on assuaging hoax asteroid impact fears? Well...asteroid impacts have been extinction-level events on Earth before. They might be again.

But let's be clear: Not today.

“2015 HM10 is a fairly ordinary near-Earth object, making a fairly ordinary close approach,” writes Eric Christensen, an astronomer who leads the Catalina Sky Survey, a project to discover rocks like this one, floating near Earth, in an e-mail.

Listen, you can’t even see this asteroid in the night sky with the naked eye. Discovered in April using a four-meter telescope in Chile, it's only about 200 feet across. It’s just one of about 100,000 similar objects that orbit the sun at about the same distance, originating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and pulled into closer orbits by the gravity of nearby planets. Near-Earth Objects this size get this close about once a year. Even most asteroids that do make it to Earth are nothing Earth-shattering (get it?). A car-sized asteroid burns up in our atmosphere probably once a month, which usually results in a nice light show and “perhaps a few small meteorites if we’re lucky,” writes Christensen.

That hasn't stopped places like Reddit and the International Business Times from suggesting that 2015 HM10 qualifies as a "near miss" that's going to "zip past" the only planet with human beings on it in the universe. It depends on your definition of "near" and "zip," perhaps.

Timing might also be at fault. If you believe the people making a documentary film about how dangerous asteroids can be, last Tuesday was Asteroid Day, part of a "global awareness movement to protect Earth from asteroid impacts." So the Internet was aflutter with asteroid-related news, including a webcast put on by NASA. Astronomers there repeatedly emphasized that the media frequently, um, misinterprets the danger of asteroid approaches. While finding and studying asteroids is an important task, nothing dramatic is imminent.

The last time an asteroid did any damage was 2013, when a 50-foot wide rock broke up over Chelyabinsk, in Russia. Almost 2,000 people were injured, mostly by glass from windows broken by fragments ejected by the explosion. No one died. “The effects from small impacts like Chelyabinsk are extremely localized, and so there is little threat to human populations from small impacts,” says Christensen. Plus, an impact as large as Chelyabinsk only happens every few decades. Impacts from large asteroids, longer than 450 feet in diameter, are even less likely—they only happen every 10,000 years or so.

Scientists do track the largest possible culprits. NASA-funded projects like the Christensen’s Catalina Sky Survey and Pan-STARRS are working to catalog 90 percent of near-Earth objects. Christensen says that they already know about 95 percent of the big ones—the objects that are larger than 3,000 feet across. None of them have any chance of hitting the planet for at least a century. Does that mean scientists shouldn't try to track more of them, or all of them? Of course not. Organizations and companies working with NASA are even developing a spacecraft to deflect the trajectory of an incoming asteroid if necessary.

The bottom line? For our solar system, today’s asteroid’s approach is business as usual, and it is really, really, really—really—unlikely that an asteroid will take a big chunk out of Earth anytime soon. “People tend to focus on the spectacular effects of potential impacts without realizing that large impacts are extremely low-probability events,” Christensen writes. “I don't spend time worrying about damaging asteroid impacts, just like I don't waste time planning how to spend my hypothetical lottery winnings.” Be not afraid, humans.