We nearly died!

No, I’m not talking about that last Rapture scare, but something far more real. Last Friday, an asteroid large enough to destroy a large city passed between Earth and the Moon – which, in case you can’t tell, is freakishly close. Why wasn’t this in the news? … Quite simply, NASA never even saw the rock until it was right in our backyard.

Now, you may be wondering how or why an asteroid could pass so dangerously close to our planet without the official organization for monitoring such events even knowing about it? Well, for starters, I’ll let the expert explain it:

In Space.com, Tariq Malik quotes Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL (which is part of NASA), as saying, "You'd expect an object of this size to fly within the orbit of the moon every few days or so." He admits that most of them simply aren't spotted: "There're about 7 million of these objects in the near-Earth space; needless to say we have discovered only a small fraction of them."

Quite frankly, it’s impossible for NASA (or anyone else) to be able to spot and keep an eye on all the NEOs (Near-Earth Objects) that whizz by every now and then. Even with all our telescopes and detection systems, we can only scan tiny portions of the sky at any given time; we’re talking about a scenario equivalent to trying to spot and track everyone walking along a crowded city street, from the visual range of a keyhole. We simply don’t have the resources to be able to keep an eye on the sky with any real efficiency. It’s very true that we could literally be destroyed by a chunk of interstellar garbage at any time, whether in ten million years or ten seconds from now on. We simply can’t know.

But, considering how un-often such objects hit us and cause any real damage – last one was some 65 million years ago, after all – it’s safe to assume we’re not about to be blown up by a chunk of space junk anytime soon. (Personally, I’m betting on grey goo.)

(via The Daily Grail)
Technorati tags: astronomy · asteroids · doomsday · NASA · space