There is a comet in the Western sky tonight. That’s not the scary part.
The scary part is this: An asteroid, only discovered six days ago, is passing relatively close to earth. And it’s as big as a city block–something that would have done a bit of hardcore damage on this planet should it have been heading this way. Luckily for us it’s not, as the Saturday night beer is still cold at your local watering hole.
But this Reuters story is worth reading, and thinking about.. and worrying about..
The money quote:
An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500.
Discovered just six days ago, the 140-metre long Asteroid 2013 ET passed about 950,000 km from Earth at 3:30 p.m. ET. That’s about 21/2 times as far as the moon, fairly close on a cosmic yardstick.
“The scary part of this one is that it’s something we didn’t even know about,” Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands.
Moving at a speed of about 41,843 km/h, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had impacted the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox.
It could have wiped out a city.
And even more alarming, it’s something no one knew about until only a few days ago.. hours, really.
This seems to be the year of the asteroid, the comet, and the ‘disaster.’ So the Mayan were wrong. December 21 ended nothing. But.. what if it began everything?
