Asteroid Just Discovered Saturday Passes Close to Earth

[Monroe]

These crazy asteroids seem to be in the news a lot over the last year or two. It went by Monday morning after just being discovered on Saturday ... not enough time to even pack and get out of town to a cave. It went by in the space between the Earth and the Moon ... size of a 10 story building ... all from the article below. What's the point of trying to keep WinXP or any computer up to date ... does it really matter?

https://www.cnet.com/news/asteroid-2017-ag13-passes-earth-moon-slooh/

Sneaky asteroid spotted whizzing between Earth and Moon

A space rock large enough to do damage gives us a near miss just two days after being discovered.

An asteroid roughly the size of a 10-story building gave Earth a particularly close pass Monday morning.

Asteroid 2017 AG13 came within half the distance from Earth to the moon as it buzzed by early Monday morning at 4:47 a.m. PT. The fly-by happened shortly after scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey first discovered the space rock on Saturday.

As you can see in the GIF below, the asteroid looks to just barely miss us as it passes. In the cosmic sense, it really was a close shave. In real terms, Earth had well over a 100,000-mile (161,000 kilometer) buffer of distance.

2017 AG13 isn't so big it would have meant an extinction-level event had it been a direct hit. But if a good size chunk of it made it through Earth's upper atmosphere near a populated area, there might have been damage like we saw in 2013 when a bolide collided with the atmosphere over the Russian city Chelyabinsk. In that event, a fireball streaked over the city, releasing 500 kilotons of energy as it ran up against some serious resistance from Earth's atmosphere and exploded, blowing out windows all over town in the process.

Earlier close calls

'B2Bomber' asteroid misses Earth; humanity exhales

The asteroid is about 36 to 111 feet (11 to 34 meters) across, according to the Slooh Observatory, and moving very fast relative to Earth at 10 miles (16 kilometers) per second. That speed, coupled with 2017 AG13's dim brightness level, made it difficult to spot with telescopes.

Various telescopes and sky surveys constantly scan Earth's neighborhood and track nearby asteroids. Most pass by at a distance several times farther away than the moon is to us, so this was a particularly close buzz by a previously unknown object.

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Edited January 10, 2017 by monroe
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