Posted on 03/05/2017 8:03:05 PM PST by BenLurkin
Less than 10 feet across, asteroid 2017 EA made its closest approach at 9:04 AM EST (14:04 Universal Time) last Thursday, coming 20 times closer than the Moon, just 9,000 miles (14,500 km) over the eastern Pacific Ocean, according to a NASA statement.
The space agency’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which operates out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, tracks asteroids and comets that come close to the Earth and computes very precise orbits for them but did not detect this asteroid until just six hours before its closest approach to Earth.
It was first sighted by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey, which is funded by NASA. Several other observatories around the world observed it between the time of its discovery and that of its closest approach.
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This was actually the second close asteroid flyby of 2017. A meteor the size of the one that exploded above Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013 passed halfway as close as the Moon in January, NASA reported.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereporter.com ...
But the time is short.
No we wont all die. If it were to enter the atmosphere most of it if not all of it would be burned up. Now something on the order of a few hundred yards or more across and yeah, we’ll have some major problems.Fact is stuff it’s our atmosphere all the time. Most of it isn’t anything to worry about and thankfully we’ve got ‘’protector’’, you might say. Jupiter. Jupiter is our ‘’cosmic shortstop’’. The old “King Of the Planets’’ with it’s powerful gravity usually pulls in all kinds of stuff that would come smashing into us. Hate to be a downer but Jupiter doesn’t get everything. Someday some big hunk of iron or nickel or a big dirty snowball it going to get us and it’ll be game over. Hey, that’s just how it is.
Asteroids orbit the sun
If they get dragged into the earth’s orbit they become meteors
A meteor that strikes the earth is a meteorite
Some people call asteroids which orbit close enough to possibly become a meteor ....meteoroids
Scientists love nomenclature
Regolithic bttt
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