An animation of the intersection of Earth’s orbit and that of 2014 JO25, prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of the California Institute of Technology, makes it look like an awfully close call, but the hard facts are more reassuring: At its closest point, the asteroid will be about five times as far from Earth as the moon is, more than 1.75 million kilometers away (1,087,400 miles).
Although the asteroid is expected to be twice as reflective as our moon, it will be difficult to spot in a night sky filled with stars, and certainly not without help. Scientists say the sort of telescope amateur astronomers use should be adequate to pick out the space rock as it whizzes across the sky at 120,000 kilometers per hour (74,500 mph).
EarthSky.org, a website that follows developments in the cosmos and throughout nature in general, has posted an article with detailed information to help sky-watchers find the asteroid on April 19, and for a day or two afterward.
Professional astronomers also will be tracking 2014 JO25 closely. Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, an extremely powerful radio telescope center, will study the asteroid for five days.
After all, it’s not often that something as big as this comes along, even a couple of million kilometers from home. NASA says 2014 JO25 hasn’t been this close to Earth in the past 400 years, and it will be at least 500 years before it comes back for a repeat close encounter with our planet.
Asteroids actually pass close to Earth fairly often, but it’s their size that matters. Asteroid 2017 GM made one of the closest passes by Earth ever seen — 16,000 kilometers (9,900 miles) above sea level — less than a week ago, on April 4. Little notice was taken, however, because that chunk of space rock was about the size of a small car.
All the more reason to delay IRS IT filings to October.
Why waste your lasts days?
Hope it’s not close enough to plow a trench through our atmosphere and disperse it.
I’ve occasionally been watching Farsight and they’ve been “viewing” an asteroid either exploding over or hitting an island somewhere in the Caribbean, for this month, fair amount of damage from wind and tsunami in south FL. Interesting stuff, one of their viewers appears to have nailed the Stockholm truck terrorist attack. In my exposure, remote viewing is hit or miss, but is a genuine thing. The older guy an the two black girls on this months’ YouTube are very interesting to watch as they do their viewings, which were recorded last month. They’re attempting to track their success rate and regiment the viewings down by sectors and coordinates. Anyone can participate if they’d like, but it’s not likely that just anybody would turn up on the monthly online broadcast, those three are pretty established as their “best.”
Consider these two “facts”:
“but it will be the closest flyby of an asteroid that large for at least another 10 years.
Asteroid 2014 JO25, discovered three years ago..”
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So they are promising no bigger asteroid for ten years, but they only discovered this one three years ago! Does anyone else see a problem here?