Close Call

[south fork]

Warehouse-sized asteroid whipped by Earth and no one saw it coming (msn.com)

[gregszybala]

Don’t look into the sun!,,

[Tam]

You wonder with all our technology how that happens. People watching space 24/7
They seem to be working on deep space .
Maybe a closer watch on home .

[gregszybala]

It is because of the sun Tam. Objects coming from that direction are hard to see because of the light.

[Tam]

I see , thank you

[Cecilia]

We gotta awhile to worry about this encounter: Apophos (?) large meteor set to "pass" Earth 2026 and return 7 yrs later, collision course unknown. This is just a jot among hundreds of jots in my iPad notebook under “Misc”. Looks like I wasn’t sure how to spell, and no notation from where I got. So……

[Uncle Trav]

The cosmic neighborhood is a huge, scary and unknown place. Just take a look at the other rocky planets in the solar system and you can see how badly they have been blasted by cosmic buckshot in the past. Luckily we have a couple of gas giant big boys that roam the neighborhood and tend to suck up a lot of renegade space rocks with their strong gravitational pull. There are a lot of rocks out there with our name on them that haven’t even been found yet. Our solar system is just a tiny part of the galactic shooting gallery. Objects coming the apparent direction of the sun are hard to detect. Rocks and comets coming from areas like the Kuiper Belt, the asteroid belt and even the Oort Cloud are uncountable. Kinda fun to look up at the sky on a clear night and wonder about all the things we still don’t know. I’m done rambling now.

[Cecilia]

Ramble on Brother. Truly, we are just specks…

[CMD]

If you go to our archaeology section, you can read about the air burst/shock wave destruction inflicted on a Middle Eastern town 3600 years ago. That event was 10x more powerful than the 1908 Tunguska air burst, which itself was 1000x larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The Tunguska shock wave flattened 82 million trees over an area 600 miles wide. Of course, there is now an effort, born in recent years to keep track of the Near Earth Objects(NEO), but we will never be able to detect them all.

[SDhunter]

Good information here

[Ron Kelley]

Thanks Dennis, That's some interesting and scary rock. I'm left wondering if Earth's gravity changed the path of the asteroid.

[south fork]

Thanks Dennis, That's some interesting and scary rock. I'm left wondering if Earth's gravity changed the path of the asteroid.

Quick climate change if it hit .

[Josie]

Interesting and scary.

[SurfaceHunter]

They wouldn’t tell us if one was going to hit anyway it would just cause panic cause there wouldn’t be anyway of knowing where it would hit. You wouldn’t be able to escape it.