You missed!
Posted on 07/26/2019 11:53:44 AM PDT by ransomnote
Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.
Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.
“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/?utm_term=.53842ff32177
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Trump’s fault
A celestial warning shot from The Big Guy?
This happens more often than not - seeing the asteroid AFTER it has gone past us. (If it comes in from the direction of the sun, it is like losing the baseball in the lights.)
Yeah - 1/5 the distance to the moon - that IS close. I wonder how long it will be if it ever comes this way again? (I have no idea how asteroids orbit.)
Missed us by that much........
Trump’s fault!
So if there was a Warning then. what? Do we all run to the asteroid shelters?
And, like the ozone hole, right over Kennebunkport. Unbelievable.
Maxwell knew in the 60s. He was the Smart one.
Most asteroids don’t wire ahead.
Wonder what he did with the grant money we gave him to look for these things?
And why did the reporters find out first?
I see what you did there. Lol
Bunch of Perverts picking tonight’s young boys ?
The Earth is about 7000 miles wide. This asteroid came within 7 diameters of hitting.
Read long ago a sizable one can go undetected until it slips into the atmosphere. Even if we’d seen this one coming, no time to react.
How far out does the gravitational pull of the earth extend. How close would one of these babies have to be to get sucked in?
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