Sky gazers have focused their telescopes towards the sky in the search of twin comets that will make a historic flyby of earth. One of the tiny comets, Comet 252P/LINEAR, has already zoomed past earth at a safe distance of 3.3 million miles from us on Monday, while the second is scheduled to whiz past on Tuesday.

On Tuesday at around 7:30 am, Comet P/2016 BA14 will be just 2.2 million miles away while passing close to earth. It will be the third closest comet flyby in history, as per astronomers.

Astronomers and space agency have already said that the two space objects will not pose any harm to people on earth, but they may help scientists know more about comets. It will be an opportunity for astronomers to understand what these space objects actually are.

Mostly, space objects are discovered when surveys search the sky with small telescopes, said Nick Moscovitz, an astronomer from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. The Discovery Channel Telescope of the observatory played a notable role in identifying the Comet P/2016 BA14 which was previously misidentified as an asteroid. The telescope is generally used to scan the sky to spot small solar system bodies like asteroids and comets.

“When you take a much larger telescope like the DCT (Discovery Channel Telescope) and point it to some of these new discoveries you can see much fainter which enables us to detect subtle indications of cometary activity like a tail or coma”, said Moscovitz.

The 250 meter-wide comet, 252P/LINEAR, zipped past earth on Monday. It was found in 2000 by Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey of MIT. When astronomers observed the Comet P/2016 BA14 closely, they found that it had a tail, which means it was also a comet.