Posted on 11/11/2009 3:44:30 PM PST by null and void
Asteroid passes just 8,700miles from Earth - with only 15 hours warning
Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the Moon
Don't panic! Although the asteroid passed within 9,000 miles of Earth it measured just 23ft across and wouldn't have dented the surface (artist's illustration) site where meteorite hit
the tumbling rock was only 23ft across. Similar sized objects pass by this close to Earth about twice a year and impact on the planet about once every five years.
Astronomers believe the object, called 2009 VA, would have almost completely burned up while entering Earth's atmosphere, causing a brilliant fireball in the sky but no major damage to the surface.
The path of the asteroid 2009 VA, which passed well within the Moon's orbit last Friday
Nasa's Near Earth Object Programme plotted the orbit of the object and determined that although it would fly extremely close to our planet it wouldn't hit us.
It was the third-closest known (non-impacting) Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.
The Nasa NEO programme aims to detect and track at least 90 per cent of the 1,000 asteroids and comets that approach Earth and are larger than 0.6miles in diameter, by 2020.
They monitored a 100ft asteroid that whizzed 45,000 miles above the Earth's surface on March 2 this year. A similar sized object slammed into Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. The impact created a blast so powerful it levelled 1,200 square miles of forest.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
ping
If it is going to hit us it really doesn’t matter how much warning we have. When an asteroid has your name on it you’re a goner. Repent now. I did.
Does that convey the same meaning as:
Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the the astroid closer to Earth than 1/30th of the distance to the Moon.
I think one this size would make a hole like the one recently in Peru (or thereabouts).
Do they know what type the one that just went by was?
I remember that part well also. He was a boy-toy of some rich woman. And as he surfed the wave he saw the preacher on The Strand go under. He thought he just might make it too, until that apartment building....
I also liked the part where the two guys had hiked up the mountain... was it Vesuvius? I forget the name, but one of them had lost his sight in the blinding flash, and the other described the scene to him.
That tears it! I’m moving!
“....with only 15 hrs. warning.....” If I had more warning I could have hid in my basement.
LOL, you will not remember the one that gets you!!
My basement is more a place to hide from than in...
That was on Thera, possibly the island that lead to the Alantis legend. Good scene.
Yup.
It was inside the orbit of Clarke Belt comm sats, which are 23,000 miles roughly.
To scale, the path of the object would be touching the image of earth, as it flew by.
I hate it when they do that. Catering to the scientific ignoramuses?
Huh?
Wha?
Who are we hiding in the basement?
And how did we come by them this time?
Derrly, did I have anything to do with this during my three day brain fog?
/ kidding.
My basement has frogs.
An honest plague of frogs.
You got it. Meteor hit on DC when the clowns are in session will solve most of the country’s problems.
Let it all dissolve back to the state capitals and maybe we don’t build another central replacement for DC.
Every time NASA releases ‘new photos’ from space or the Hubble they are only artist renditions based on nothing more than computer data coming back. They add pretty made up colors to different density areas but nothing really having to do with the colors in the end.
Nothing shuts up a commie big mouth like pistols at 60 paces.
Too much of a WMD.
I'd hate to lose the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian...
The Library would be a devastating loss.
But the Congress?
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