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To: a fool in paradise

I don’t know.

I’ll check my diary.

Let’s see.....14 October 2012.......I had spaghetti for lunch.....my wife yelled at me because she lost the car keys.....my Son was playing computer games.....Hillary Clinton was lying to us.....

Nope, nothing about an asteroid.

Just another day.


14 posted on 10/14/2017 3:59:56 PM PDT by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: blueunicorn6

http://earthsky.org/space/near-earth-asteroid-2012-tc4-close-pass-october-2017

Prior to this year, this object was observed for just one week in the year 2012. Astronomers tracked its orbit well enough to know it would return – and come close to Earth – but they didn’t have its orbit pinned down precisely. Last summer, experts were already saying they knew this space rock wouldn’t hit us, but they thought 2012 TC4 might give us a close shave, passing as close as 4,200 miles (6,800 km). In late July, though, astronomers recovered the space rock – picked it up telescopically again, after not seeing it for some years – and the new observations let them refine their knowledge of 2012 TC4’s orbit and better compute its closest distance to Earth later this month...

...The calculations on the October, 2017 pass of asteroid 2012 TC4, for example, were originally based on only seven days of tracking it, shortly after it was discovered in 2012. Then we lost the object again, in the depths of space, as it sped away from us. That’s an exceedingly common scenario for close-passing asteroids, which are, after all, just flying chunks (some more like flying mountains) of rock in space. They sweep past, then go their way...

... they know that asteroid 2012 TC4 has made many close approaches to Earth in the past...

...This summer, an international collaboration of telescopes is trying to reacquire the asteroid – that is, find it again in space – with the goal of precisely determining its orbit.


I think it’ll be back sooner than 62 years.


15 posted on 10/14/2017 4:07:59 PM PDT by a fool in paradise (Did Barack Obama denounce Communism and dictatorships when he visited Cuba as a puppet of the State?)
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To: blueunicorn6
That looks awfully similar to my diary!

Of course, excepting the wifey screamy thingy, those could be any day in most of our diaries.

17 posted on 10/15/2017 7:16:49 AM PDT by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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