Earth has near miss with asteroid

Well this was a surprise. It turns out that early this morning an asteroid, described as being the size of a ten-story building whizzed past the Earth. How close was it? About 40,000 miles, but before you start thinking that’s a pretty long distance, keep in mind it’s only about one-fifth the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The asteroid was estimated to be the same size as one that exploded over the skies of Siberia 100 years ago in the “Tunguska Incident.” That blast flattened hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest and cast a glow in the sky that could be seen in London thousands of miles away.

The scary thing about all of this is that the asteroid, with the lyrical name of DD45 2009, was only discovered on Saturday - not nearly enough time to do anything about it if we had discovered that DD45 was heading for an impact with Earth. It underscores the fact that there are practically no resources dedicated to finding and tracking “Near Earth Objects”, those rockets and comets hurtling around the Solar System that occasionally pass close to Earth. Scientists have estimated that only about 10% of the NEOs have been identified (which means 90% haven’t).

One NEO that we know will be paying us a visit in the not too distant future is a quarter-mile wide rock called Apophis (after an Egyptian demon from the underworld who tries to swallow the sun - a nice, friendly name) that will pass within an estimated 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029, a pass so close it will change Apophis’ orbit, making predictions of future encounters (like in 2036) impossible at this time.

DD45 2009 orbits the sun about once every year and a half, so far there are no predictions of any future close encounters.