It appears as though Santa and his reindeer won't be the only things flying through the night sky on Christmas Eve. is slated to fly by Earth, about 6.7 million miles away but still visible to those who are scouting with their telescopes – assuming they have clear, cloudless skies, of course.

"The 2015 apparition is the first of five encounters by this object in the next 12 years when itwill be close enough for a radar detection," the planning from NASA reads. The asteroid will fly by once again at a closer range in 2018, but this time around it will safely pass at a distance 28 times farther away than the moon.

The 1.25 mile-long, was first discovered in 2003 at the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search program in Flagstaff, Arizona, EarthSky reported.

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According to the Daily Mail, some reports that the asteroid and volcanic eruptions have been dismissed by experts, who say its earliest threat to Earth would be in 200 years at least. For now, the asteroid is harmless - so much so, in fact, that we may eventually investigate it at a closer range.

"What we learn from the Christmas Eve asteroid could be particularly important since NASA is thinking about in the decades to come," Sarah Fecht of Popular Science wrote.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Best Space Photos of 2015

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this close-up image of an outburst on the sun's surface, between Nov. 3-5, 2015. Though the sun’s extreme ultraviolet light is invisible to our eyes, the wavelength is colorized here in red. (NASA/SDO)