News of asteroids closing in on Earth constantly make headlines, with disaster movies adding to the mix and increasing obsession with these phenomena or news of impending doom. NASA finally took it upon itself to give an answer on the subject.

NASA released a short video yesterday, Wednesday, featuring scientist Kelly Fast, who tackled the question head-on: "Will an asteroid ever hit Earth?"

Of course, asteroids have hit Earth before, over the course of its 4-billion-year lifespan, and this will happen in the future as well, but "it doesn't happen very often."

There are always space rocks smashing into our atmosphere, but they usually break into smaller chunks, dazing us with meteor showers and shooting stars. Asteroids, on the other hand, happen on a whole different time scale, in the  "hundreds to thousands to millions of years."

The type of asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago, for example, was calculated to occur once every 250 million years, accord to a team of researchers.