Giant asteroid heading close to Earth

Source: Telegraph

Giant asteroid heading close to Earth
A giant asteroid weighing 55 million tonnes will just miss the Earth later this year, Nasa experts have predicted.
By Martin Evans 7:02AM BST 05 May 2011

The rock, which is quarter of a mile across, will pass between our planet and the moon in November and will be visible with small telescopes.

Robin Scagell of the Society for Popular Astronomy said: “It’s rare we get the chance to see an asteroid up close.”

If it were to hit the earth, the asteroid, named YU55, would have an impact equivalent to 65,000 atom bombs and would leave a crater more than six miles wide and 2,000ft deep.

Passing by at a distance of just 201,000 miles, the asteroid will be the largest object ever to approach the earth so close.



Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8494145/Giant-asteroid-heading-close-to-Earth.html

?

Who the F paid for that nonsense?

...well, yes, it is and Smedley Butler was prescient, but religion is and always has been the best racket.

They's money in them thar hills!

because it would just kill most of us anyways if it hit right?

It wouldn't be a painful death, but watching the giant wave head towards you probably wouldn't be a very nice last few moments.

I wouldn't want to be within, oh, two hundred miles of it, and the next year or two would be chilly, but something like that wouldn't be a world-ender like the Chicxulub impactor.

The Tunguska explosion was a comet about half that size exploding in midair, for comparison.

Shouldn't the Secretary of Asteroids be working on this?

From his office at Camp Swampy, the Secretary is preparing to raise the threat level from Green to Blue for the first time in memory.

He's having his office spiffed up in preparation for an anticipated visit by a reporter, maybe.

:hi:

This sounds like a pretty good cabinet post. Does the Secretary of Asteroids sit at the big table with the other secretaries? Or at the little table for Secretaries of Departments That Don't Have Real Guns?

You'd probably get a lot of miss-addressed spam mail meant for the Secretary of Hemorrhoids.

"Bugger it! Missed again ... but at least I'm getting closer!"

:evilgrin:

???

It's mountain sized. But at that range I'm not sure it would even be detectable by the instruments we use to measure slight gravity variations here on Earth. (Such as those caused by our own mountains.)

. . . it won't be a danger to the earth for another 100 years or so. !!!!

That would be - within the recorded history of such events, anyway. I'm sure there have been some massive objects which came very much closer in the history of the planet.