Earth Just Narrowly Missed Getting Hit by an Asteroid

[Steve0x]

The asteroid missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the Moon.

On Saturday, astronomers discovered a new asteroid, just a few hours before it almost hit us.

The asteroid is called 2016 QA2, and it missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon. That puts it about three times as far away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it coming.

So how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit. It's highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging out by either Mars or Venus, but rarely ends up near Earth.

But another, more worrying reason is that there aren't a lot of people looking for potentially dangerous asteroids. While Congress has tasked NASA with finding 90 percent of asteroids 450 feet or larger by 2020, the agency is nowhere close to that goal. Funding for asteroid detection is very low, and most telescopes that could detect asteroids of this size won't come online for a few more years.

 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a22619/earth-narrowly-missed-by-asteroid/

 

WOW!

[usmccharles]

Damn.. Should of put this in my nasa thread! I love this kind of stuff 

[darklight1216]

That's pretty interesting. 

[Steve0x]

7 hours ago, usmccharles said:

Damn.. Should of put this in my nasa thread! I love this kind of stuff 

So do i Charles. I miss all those Apollo and Shuttles live telecasts

[codizzle]

Thank you Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck 

[Deflated Football]

What would've happened had it hit us?

[K-Dog]

6 minutes ago, Deflated Football said:

What would've happened had it hit us?

Bad things.

Very bad things.

[Deflated Football]

37 minutes ago, K-Dog said:

Bad things.

Very bad things.

Like, the end of the world? Lol I'm oblivious to this kind of stuff

[GrimCoconut]

2 hours ago, Deflated Football said:

What would've happened had it hit us?

Perriman probably wouldn't be playing tomorrow night 

[usmccharles]

4 hours ago, codizzle said:

Thank you Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck 

Never forget

3 hours ago, Deflated Football said:

What would've happened had it hit us?

Dinosaurs would die.  Not really, according to the article it was 55 feet wide, not sure how much of that would burn up entering our atmosphere, but here is a quote about one that missed us and it was 150 feet wide.  I dont know if the calculations would be the same if you just divided by 3:

"The asteroid is about 150 feet in diameter and has a mass estimated at about 143,000 tons," NASA astronomer Don Yeomans wrote in a Feb. 9 opinion piece for The New York Times. "Should an object of that size hit Earth, it would cause a blast with the energy equivalent of about 2.4 million tons — or 2.4 megatons — of TNT explosives, more than 180 times the power of the atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima."    Per Space.com

Edited August 31, 2016 by usmccharles

[Cville-Raven]

1 hour ago, GrimCoconut said:

Perriman probably wouldn't be playing tomorrow night 

This is the real reason I'm glad it didn't hit us

[Steve0x]

6 hours ago, Deflated Football said:

What would've happened had it hit us?

This 

 

[Inqui]

8 hours ago, Deflated Football said:

What would've happened had it hit us?

If I'm not mistaken (and I'm sure someone more sciencey than myself can and will correct me here) Earth gets hit by thousands of asteroids a day. It's just that most burn up in the atmosphere as charles described and basically land on the surface as dust.

[allblackraven]

19 hours ago, usmccharles said:

Damn.. Should of put this in my nasa thread! I love this kind of stuff 

Yeah, until it hits.

[usmccharles]

2 hours ago, allblackraven said:

Yeah, until it hits.

Well... Won't be able to realize the consequences 

[ravensdan]

This happened early this AM

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/09/spacex-explosion-need-know/amp/?client=safari

[allblackraven]

24 minutes ago, ravensdan said:

This happened early this AM

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/09/spacex-explosion-need-know/amp/?client=safari

Hrm, are bookings being cancelled yet?

[usmccharles]

 I keep getting an ad-blocker pop-up (how ironic) and cant read the full article, someone quote it?  Has anyone heard of MarsOne? very interesting, I think I posted about it in my NASA thread.  I don't know why SpaceX and MarsOne don't combine resources and try to work together.  

Maybe we should combine the threads, there was good info in the other one.