Thursday, March 17, 2011

House-sized asteroid zips past Earth

Posted By on Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 8:40 AM

Twitterers in Puerto Rico reported seeing the asteroid.

An asteroid the size of a house zoomed by Earth Wednesday, flying within the orbit of the moon just one day after astronomers spotted the space rock in the sky, NASA says.

The small asteroid 2011 EB74 was about 47 feet across and posed no threat of hitting Earth, since it was too small to survive the trip through the planet's atmosphere.

Instead, the asteroid passed our planet at a comfortable distance of about 203,000 miles when it made its closest approach at 5:49 p.m. EDT, NASA officials said.

Read the rest of this MSNBC article, by Tariq Malik, here.

I don't know about you, but the most startling part of the above snip has to do with NASA only detecting the asteroid one day before it came to visit.

If you've ever wondered what an asteroid is, check this out:

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Tell you what, go grab your telescope and try to find something 47 feet across in space.

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Posted by Wes on 03/17/2011 at 10:03 AM

Roids also do not generate light so it is not like trying to find a star or something. We have been hit by these things in the past and will be hit by them in the future, it is only a matter of when. For this reason alone we need to keep a nuke weapons delivery system. Every wonder where the dinos went?

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Posted by Frank Griffin on 03/17/2011 at 2:08 PM

Frank: A nuclear weapon is not capable of reaching, much less diverting a E.L.E. asteroid.

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Posted by DLP on 03/17/2011 at 4:53 PM
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