It’s not about how close it gets, it’s about how serious it would be if it hit, a real crisis — seems like a perfectly good reason to continue to suspend our liberties. /rimshot
Asteroid the size of the Golden Gate Bridge will whiz past Earth in March
By Patrick Pester - Staff Writer 25 days ago
https://www.livescience.com/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-whizzes-near-earth-2001-fo32.html
Don’t panic; it won’t get that close.
An asteroid as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge is long will hurtle past Earth next month. But although it will be the biggest and speediest asteroid to fly by our planet this year, there’s no reason to panic.
The space rock, officially called 231937 (2001 FO32), is about 0.5 to 1 mile (0.8 to 1.7 kilometers) in diameter and will come within 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) of Earth at 11:03 a.m. EST (1603 GMT) on March 21 — close enough and large enough to be classified as “potentially hazardous,” according to a database published by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
An asteroid is designated as “potentially hazardous” when its orbit intersects with Earth’s at a distance of no more than about 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) and it is bigger than about 500 feet (140 meters) in diameter, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
And it will pass within 1.25 million miles. I guess we should all be worried because the moon is only 200,000 miles away.