Astronomers continue to look to the heavens. Some look for answers, others find more questions. While still others look out for potentially devastating asteroids heading for Earth.

A large asteroid, however, just slipped past astronomers and surprised them.

The potentially hazardous asteroid named 2014 UR116 is 370 meters wide and could have possibly hit the Earth.

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Were it to hit, the impact of that asteroid would have been 1,000 times greater than the Chelyabinsk asteroid that exploded in the skies of Russia in February of 2013 causing serious damage and injuring about 1,500 people.

Vladimir Lipunov, the discoverer of UR116, said that the asteroid won't hit the Earth. Lipunov noted that the asteroid wasn't seen by much bigger telescope networks.

"It's funny that much larger [American] telescopes ... than our MASTER (robotic telescope), missed such utter lump! The reason is that all previous flybys of the Earth took place during the full moon, when the anti-asteroid system is idle," Lipunov wrote on his blog.

Scientists are discovering Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA) all the time. PHAs are defined as space rocks larger than 100 meters that come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU.

Lipunov said it's difficult calculating the orbit of big rocks such as the one he discovered since their trajectories are constantly being changed by the gravitational pull of other planets.

He stressed asteroids must be constantly tracked because a single mistake could mean catastrophe.

Another dangerous asteroid called Apophis was located in 2004. It's as big as three football fields.

While Apophis is projected to fly by the Earth in 2029 and 2036, they must constantly be tracked to make sure no large football field-like rocks come falling out of the sky.

TagsUR 116, asteroid, Vladimir Lipunov