Asteroid the size of a football pitch, only discovered last week, passes within one million miles of Earth Three asteroids passed close by this weekend One asteroid on Saturday was 'just a stone's throw' away from Earth It could have wiped out a large city if it had landed on a populated area Astronomers on the Canary Islands captured a video of one flying past A 460-foot long asteroid sped close by the Earth on Saturday night. Discovered just six days ago, asteroid 2013 ET passed 600,000 miles from Earth at 8 30pm GMT. It was about 2.5 times as far away as the moon, which in space terms is a close shave. 'The scary part of this one is that it's something we didn't even know about,' said Patrick Paolucci, president of the Slooh Space Camera, commenting on live images of the asteroid flying past taken from a telescope in the Canary Islands. Through the telescope: Asteroid 2013 ET as seen from the Canary Islands on March 9th as it sped by Earth No warning: No one had realised the asteroid, which was as big as a football pitch was going to pass so close to the Earth until six days ago but astronomers on the Canary Islands captured the image Moving at a speed of about 26,000 miles per hour, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had hit the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox. Two other small asteroids, both about the size of the Russian meteor, will also be in Earth's neighborhood this weekend. Asteroid 2013 EC 20 passed just 93,000 miles away on Saturday, which Cox explained is 'a stone's throw' from Earth. On Sunday, Asteroid 2013 EN 20 will fly about 279,000 miles from Earth. Both were discovered just three days ago. 'We know that the solar system is a busy place,' said Cox. 'We're not sitting here on our pale, blue dot on our own in nice safety.' This should be a wake up call to governments. Asteroid sightings: Scientists say we are seeing many more these days as astronomers watch the skies from all over the world, like this footage from the Virtual Telescope Project in Ceccano, Italy, of Monday's asteroid These three are part of a series of space debris to pass near the earth recently. Asteroid 2013 ET, which passed on Saturday night, was nearly eight times larger than the bus-sized asteroid that exploded on February 15 over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The force of the explosion, equivalent to about 440 kilotons of dynamite, created a shock wave that shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 1,500 people. 1,200 were injured when an untracked lump of space rock exploded over the Urals in Russia on February 15 2013 The rock hit the atmosphere at a speed of at least 33,000mph The 10,000-ton lump of space rock exploded, creating a "sonic boom" that shattered windows and rocked buildings On the same day another smaller asteroid called DA14 passed closer to the Earth than communications and weather satellites The last time something major struck the Earth was in 1908, when an asteroid about 50 metres wide exploded over Siberia About 100 tons of material from space hit Earth every day. A bright comet show is also now on the way -Comet ISON may come close to outshining the moon in November Later that day, another small asteroid, known as DA14, passed about 17,200 miles (27,680 km) from Earth, closer than the orbiting networks of communications and weather satellites. NASA has been ordered by the U.S. Congress to find and track all near-Earth objects 0.62 miles or larger in diameter, and estimates about 95 percent have been identified. However, only about 10 percent of smaller asteroids have been discovered, NASA scientists have said. The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to discover if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes of sending up a spacecraft to avert catastrophe. Astronomers currently expect an object about the size of what hit Russia to strike the planet about every 100 years. Near miss: The meteor is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk in a video shot last month