Recently Discovered Near-Earth Asteroid Makes Record-breaking Approach to Earth
Discovered on Monday and missed us by a whisker on Thursday…gulp!
I wonder, if this thing was going to hit us, would 3 or 4 days notice have been long enough to get Bruce Willis and his shambolic crew of oil men trained up, suited up and sent up in time?
This time we make sure Affleck stays up there, too…
But seriously, folks… with 4 days’ warning we’d be up you know what creek. Fortunately, from what I read this one was small (a mere 100-footer) and it was estimated that had it been a head-on it would have just set off some heavy firework, maybe even airbursted and not even made a small crater – but that would depend on composition. It kind of figures that for short-period inner-system bodies like this one, the really big mothers have been mostly swept up in the preceeding 4.5 billion years of orbital bumper pool. It’s those long-period suckers coming in from the outer system that can really git ya…