Posted on 01/10/2017 12:28:09 PM PST by BenLurkin
An asteroid roughly the size of a 10-story building gave Earth a particularly close pass Monday morning.
Asteroid 2017 AG13 came within half the distance from Earth to the moon as it buzzed by early Monday morning at 4:47 a.m. PT. The fly-by happened shortly after scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey first discovered the space rock on Saturday.
...
In the cosmic sense, it really was a close shave. In real terms, Earth had well over a 100,000-mile (161,000 kilometer) buffer of distance.
...
The asteroid is about 36 to 111 feet (11 to 34 meters) across, according to the Slooh Observatory, and moving very fast relative to Earth at 10 miles (16 kilometers) per second. That speed, coupled with 2017 AG13's dim brightness level, made it difficult to spot with telescopes.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
If the asteroid had any decency if would go behind the moon to whiz.
Groan!
That was a quick win.
It’s the biggest threat mankind faces, while the dopes in government fiddle.
death from the sky
Could this be it???? The X-27B is perplexing, what could they possibly be testing in such a small and confined area and why does it need to be in space for such a long time??? My best guess... It's got something to do with time travel or maybe cryogenics.... They're freezing something, sending it to orbit and then reviving it upon it's return to earth.
We already do that with chicken, mostly without the flying around stuff.
But chickens don't fly that good anyway.
So... frozen chicken.
Not exactly groundbreaking.
What’s worrying is not that we just saw a rock the size of a 10-story building flying past; what’s worrying is thinking about how many of these we haven’t seen. A rock that big made Meteor Crater in Arizona, and there haven’t (to the best of our knowledge) been any strikes that big since then. The closest we’ve come is Tunguska, and even that was over an uninhabited area. Something as big as this latest rock smacking down in a populated area would be a major catastrophe; not ELE by any means, but imagine if it hit on the outskirts of London, or Phoenix? The blast was estimated to be the equivalent of 10MT, which would level the city even if it wasn’t a direct hit. A strike out in the fields of Nebraska or Kansas would put a major dent in the crop growing there, and affect farming operations for years due to the ejecta.
I watch Spaceweather.com all the time for the near-earth fly-bys. And it seems that all of these particularly large <1LD flybys happen to pop up only on that day, or after.
What good is this system anyway ?! Are they just not telling us until they’re sure it’s a miss ?
I gotta believe they'd holler "duck" just so they would keep their reputations intact.
“scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey”
That sounds like a pretty laid back place for a scientist to work. I’m imagining a bunch of guys in shorts and sandals with labcoats on listening to the Doobie Brothers while doing their experiments.
Hate to break it to you but that thing can’t make it out of low earth orbit, so that’s definitely not what was observed.
Given the normal weather in the Catalina Mountains, your guess as to dress is probably pretty close to accurate (though its pretty snowy up there right now).
“So... frozen chicken.
Not exactly groundbreaking.”
With the time travel element they could be reverse engineering a T-Rex.
Can it still be seen? Is this the asteroid that was coming about the time of the inauguration. The Trump asteroid.
Asteroids, in the scale of celestial objects, are tiny, and scientists can only track them visually, since asteroids don’t produce any radiation we could detect.
They have to spot a tiny object visually, then spot it again and somehow confirm it is the same object before they can get an idea of its trajectory. Then they have to plug that into a computer and rely on inherently unreliable models to try and predict its future course. For really big asteroids this can be done pretty effectively, but those asteroids stay in the asteroid belt anyway.
Excellent!
*rimshot!*
Had that thing hit us it would have been a very bad day on the planet.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.