From the BBC
9 February 2018
An asteroid up to 40m in size and only discovered five days ago, is due to skim past the Earth on Friday. Asteroid 2018 CB will pass by at just less than one-fifth the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona, a Nasa-funded project to record potentially hazardous asteroids. However, while the pass is relatively close in astronomical terms, it's nowhere near enough to be a threat. The 15-40m space rock is set to make its closest approach to Earth at 22:27 GMT. "Although 2018 CB is quite small, it might well be larger than the asteroid that entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, almost exactly five years ago, in 2013," said Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
"Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet - maybe only once or twice a year." CB 2018 will buzz us at a distance of 69,700km (43,300 miles), which is roughly twice as far as the belt of satellites which orbit Earth in geostationary orbit. Another small asteroid passed within lunar distance this week. Known as 2018 CC, the object made its closest approach to Earth on 6 February at a distance of about 184,000km (114,000 miles). That asteroid, also discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, was estimated to be between 15m and 30m (50-100ft) in size.
[OK, the most disturbing thing about it is that they only discovered it 5 days previously….! I’m hoping that, if it had been much larger, that it would’ve been spotted sooner – at least that’s the hope. I do wonder if they’d tell us if it was going to impact though. Thankfully the one that exploded over Russia 5 years ago didn’t happen during the dark years of the Cold War. Can you imagine if such a thing caught the Russian missile defence system napping or during a tense internal crisis! It just doesn’t bear thinking about…. I guess that sooner or later one of this Near Earth Asteroids will impact somewhere. I suppose it’s only a matter of time. With luck it’ll hit somewhere harmless and the next time we’ll be ready for it. Either that or we’ll have a tragedy followed by a global tourist attraction….. I’m starting to realise who the dinosaurs felt – if they were aware of what was going on……………………….]
3 comments:
i wonder if there was ever a probability analysis done on when a major impact will occur.... with computers i'd think it'd be a fairly simple operation... meanwhile, although i'm not religious in any way: some god is throwing rocks at the earth...
@ Mudpuddle: Yes, I believe there has been a study/studies regarding the probability of impact. I also understand that funding for the actual search for Earth-skimmers is pretty low and quite a bit of the sky isn't covered at all - as the Director of NASA said in the movie Armageddon "It's a big-ass sky". But once we get hit - hopefully by a little one away from people - funding a defences will improve!
I think that if humanity does not destroy itself or civilization, we should be able to develop the technology to defect these things.
I guess when one hits again, chances are that it will be the size of The Tunguska event. If it is a lot bigger, we may very well go the way of the dinosaurs.
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