Posted on 11/08/2018 5:00:33 AM PST by BenLurkin
The first of which, Asteroid 2018 VS1, will skim our planet by 861,700 miles at around 2.03pm on Saturday.
Experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California believe that its size could be anything from 12ft to 91ft meters wide. The asteroid isn’t in danger of hitting Earth, but if it did the consequences could be a wee bit scary. The second asteroid is comparable in size and speed to Asteroid VS1 but it will pass at a much safer distance of 3.12 million miles away.
However, the third will come much closer. Asteroid VX1 will pass Earth at around 6.21pm on Saturday and will miss us by just 237,037 miles. Which is closer to us than the moon. ‘As they orbit the Sun, Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth,’ warned the American space agency. ‘Note that a ‘close’ passage astronomically can be very far away in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometres.’
If that wasn’t enough, the spooky skull-shaped asteroid that passed by on Halloween is coming back round for another pass on Sunday. It’s officially called 2015 TB145 and last zoomed by on October 31, 2015, coming within 302,000 miles of our planet, which is about 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The ominous object is literally the ghost of a comet which was killed by the Sun It is thought to be a ‘dead comet’ which has been radically altered by orbiting our star for millions of years and is up to 2,300ft wide.
(Excerpt) Read more at metro.co.uk ...
Trump’s fault?
Mock all you want. Someday we get hit. We just don’t know when.
No point in panicking, but it’s not a joke either.
There is no zombie apocalypse, but if there was...!!!
861,700 miles is over three times the distance the moon is from the Earth. Next the media will claim the moon is "grazing" the Earth's surface.
Typical media headline hype.
Mock all you want. Someday we get hit. We just don’t know when.
No point in panicking, but it’s not a joke either.
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Your right.
One of these days the scientists will be right. We just gotta hope it’s not in our lifetime.
Yes, it’s a joke. For sure, some day we’ll get hit. And soon, in astronomical terms. But “soon” may mean 25,000 years or more. The odds of us getting hit on any given day are infinitessimally small.
Precisely. Ask the dinosaurs if you don’t believe it.
What's a ft meter? Is it one of these:
man-made climate change will lure them closer and closer each year ..
The moon's distance from the earth varies from 225,000 to 252,000 miles, with a mean distance of 238,855 miles. I'm not sure how much that is in ft meters.
#ParisAccord
You saw that too? LOL I guess editing and proof reading is a dying art. If Word doesn’t underline it in red, they let it go... SMH
Regardless of size, they are able to see where it has been...a year ago then 6 months then a month, etc. Simple math given its speed, trajectory and the influence of Earth's (and other planets') gravity.
Determining size is much more difficult.
how should we prepare in response to the warning?
Ask the dinosaurs if you don’t believe it.
To measure their orbit, which tells you how close they'll come, all you need to see is a point of light over a period of several nights. To measure their size you need to either see a visible disk or know how light or dark the object is. If it's light colored it could be reflecting up to about 40% of the light that hits it. If it's dark it could be reflecting less than 10% of the light that hits it and could be huge and still look small and dim.
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