Hark!  Another Space Bullet!

It may sound unsettling to hear that a potential killer known as asteroid 2012 DA14 will be coming closer to Earth than telecommunication satellites on Feb. 15, but don't panic: Earth's gravitational field will give it such a kick that we'll never have to worry about it again.

"It has been getting closer to Earth for quite a while," Donald Yeomans, the head of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told reporters on Thursday during a preview for the close encounter. "This is the closest predicted [flyby] for this object both in the past and in the future."

NASA's calculations show that Earth's gravity will perturb the 150-foot-wide (45-meter-wide) asteroid's orbital period, which had been getting close to Earth's own one-year orbit. "Earth is going to put this one in an orbit that is considerably safer than the orbit it has been in," Yeomans said.

This makes 2012 DA14 nothing more than one of the universe's most vivid reminders that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery. The rocky asteroid's orbit is so well-known that Yeomans can say it will pass by Earth at a minimum distance of 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers), plus or minus 100 miles. That's in the "sweet spot" between GPS satellite orbits (6,000 to 12,000 miles) and geosynchronous telecom satellites (22,000 miles), Yeomans said.

He said that there's an "extremely remote" chance that 2012 DA14 could hit a satellite on its way in or out of Earth's neighborhood, and that satellite operators were being given orbital tracking data as a precaution. But William Ailor, an expert on orbital debris at The Aerospace Corp., told NBC News that the chance is hardly worth worrying about.

"The fact is, we don't have collisions very often, even among the satellites that are there all the time," Ailor said. "Space is very active, but there's a lot of it above us."