This is an interesting story that barely gets a headline. Maybe because it happens all the time. Asteroid narrowly misses earth. How narrow? It came about one fifth the distance between the earth and the moon. That's fairly close and we only hear about it after it's past. I wonder why governments have a problem with public trust.
Ever see the movie Armageddon? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq6q2BrTino It was about a huge asteroid on collision course with the earth and how they had to send a drilling team to plant a nuclear bomb deep within the asteroid to break it up enough to be disintegrated into meteors when it entered the earth’s atmosphere.
Well this asteroid wasn’t that big but it was big enough to do about as much damage as the one that hit Siberia in 1908 that exploded in the atmosphere and created a 10 –15 megaton explosion about 1,0000 times the size of the bomb that hit Hiroshima.
Fear and paranoia are somewhat counterproductive, as the rantings of Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling can be somewhat absurd. Nevertheless, it’s nice to know about these asteroid before they come so close to home.
The 2029 impact is sitting at a 1 in 40 chance. I still think it’s next to impossible to predict impact that far in advance but I never really paid too much attention to the finer details of mathematical trajectories of asteroids: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_update_041227.html
Speaking of astronomy, it’s hard to keep up with all the missions that have been going on. I didn’t even hear about this one that landed on an asteroid; http://near.jhuapl.edu/
This is NASA’s Near Earth Object watch: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
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