Tomorrow, February 15, an asteroid will buzz by our planet, missing by about 17,200 miles, which is inside the orbit of some of our satellites circling the Earth. Don't worry, though this is an incredibly close fly-by, it should not be affecting our lives in the slightest. Still it's nice to know what time, and where, the asteroid, called 2012 DA14, will be at its closest point to our planet.
2012 DA14 is an asteroid about as long as half a football field which was discovered by a team of amateur astronomers with the La Sagra Sky Survey at an observatory on the island of Mallorca, Spain. They discovered it last year, on February 23, 2012.
The rock should be passing at its closest point, 5,000 miles closer than our GPS and weather satellites, at 2:24 p.m. U.S. Eastern Standard time. At that time, it will be over Sumatra, Indonesia.
This will be the closest fly-by ever observed by scientists for an asteroid this large. However, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before, it just means that we know bout it this time. "Thirty years ago, we would not have been able to find the thing," said Michael Busch to the Washington Post. Busch is a planetary astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico.
Scientists are keeping close track of the asteroid, and already have calculated that the Earth's gravitational pull will alter the path of 2012 DA14 in a good way. The asteroid won't be near Earth again for a long time
Even if 2012 DA14 hit Earth at some point, it wouldn't be a world-ending event, though it wouldn't be pleasant either. A similarly sized object is theorized to have breached Earth's atmosphere in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. In that event, the object likely exploded on entry, leveling trees for about 800 square miles.
via Space.com
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