An asteroid passed close to Earth on Saturday.

We don’t have any rocks on Earth that are older than about 4 billion years old, so we don’t know exactly how much volcanic activity there was or how heavily Earth was bombarded by asteroids” said Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist who heads Goddard’s Mid-Atlantic Noble Gas Research Laboratory.

A spacecraft destined to explore a unique asteroid will also test new communication hardware that uses lasers instead of radio waves.

Wil Santiago, an engineer at Lockheed Martin Space, told NASA TV, "It's like going back in time. These asteroids are time capsules."

Trojan asteroids are believed to be artifacts from when the solar system was formed, and scientists hope that by studying them, they can better understand how the solar system evolved.

A large asteroid was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The spacecraft’s many science instruments will study the asteroids’ surface features, their varied landscapes, and perhaps even their internal structure.

On the fifteenth of February, two thousand and thirteen, an asteroid, at a distance of twenty eight thousand kilometres, with a size the of half a football field, passed our planet.

Next month, the spacecraft Dart is set to ram an asteroid 11 million kilometers from Earth in an attempt to change its course. The mission is a test of technologies that could be used one day to save Earth from a hazardous asteroid.

The asteroid will safely pass at a distance of 6.3 million kilometers from Earth.