Earth barely escapes an asteroid rendezvous

Astronauts have said that our planet earth barely survived a collision with an asteroid which they claim was the size of a bus. However, experts say that they are not concerned about the impact that the collision would have had. This finding is certainly
not a shocker as such types of asteroids are rarely seen except when they come in close contact with our planet.

The asteroid, 2012 BX34, measured between 20 to 62 feet and popped into the view of an Arizona-based telescope on Wednesday. It came within 37,000 miles of Earth on Friday, at around 3PM GMT

This near miss will make the top 20 list of closes approached asteroids that have ever been observed. NASA had announced on Twitter on Thursday that the asteroid would safely pass Earth on January 27th.

The distance is about a sixth of the one separating Earth from the Moon, and in the past year, there have been some 30 objects that were observed within the orbit of the Moon. The asteroid itself is on radar, but NASA can only predict its path for a couple
of days into the future. If it was maintained on radar, the path could be detected in advance for decades.

The asteroid is so small that even if it does collide with Earth, it would not survive its passage into the atmosphere in one piece. All that will remain are a few fist and football-sized rocks that come to the ground as meteorites.

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Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Jan 31 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry