The church of perpetual panic is at it again.
“Uncomfortably close?” “Only a matter of time before a collision”?
One of these objects landing within a mile of you would be unpleasant. Any further away you’d hear it, maybe get a shake or two through the ground, but no catastrophic stuff.
Do I ever weary of this constant doomsaying.
and given the damage it caused, and the energy released, I don't think I'd want to be under 20 miles from its point of detonation should it have come in at a steep angle. Note that "Tunguska" has been recently re-analyzed (the object's own momentum included in the explosion's effects) to be in the 3-5 megaton range...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
2009 WB105 is most likely considerably bigger than the impactor that created Meteor (Barringer) Crater in AZ. If it came in at a steep angle, a conservative estimate would be a resulting explosion of 40 megatons. If that is similarly directed as per the recent analysis of the Tunguska impactor... I think I'd want to be well over 50 miles away. If it makes it to the surface, I'm not sure how far fragments of Earth's crust might be tossed.
All that said, the likelihood of any human getting whacked by an asteroid is quite low. Then again, counting the really big ones, the risk may be greater than the risk of being killed by lightning.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-meteorite-death-india-probability-odds/
My 1st question is, how sure is NASA that one of these objects trajectory will not be altered slightly by a collision with some other object too small to readily detect, while the "near Earth object is several days away. That is, perhaps "it will pass by Earth safely" should be modified to "it will almost certainly pass by Earth safely".
My 2nd question is, why do so many of these close passages seem to occur on weekends? Is it a little joke by the Creator?
Hard to believe we’ve survived the last ten years... no less the tens of thousands of years we’ve been dodging these bullets...
Democrats like to whip up hysteria...