Space & Astronomy

Asteroid narrowly avoids striking the Earth

By T.K. Randall
January 10, 2017 ·  28 comments

Asteroids still pose a very real threat to our planet. Image Credit: NASA The space rock, which was around the same size as the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia back in 2013, was only picked up for the first time by astronomers at the weekend.

It went on to pass around half way between the Earth and the Moon at 16km per second.

While you were hitting snooze, we nearly hit an asteroid! At 7:47 AM EST an asteroid we only first spotted Saturday gave us a wake up call. pic.twitter.com/BbAQc7e2EJ

— Slooh (@Slooh) January 9, 2017

The fact that it was only detected for the first time mere days before it passed us by however shows just how vulnerable we still are to threats from space. If it had been much larger and had actually been on a direct collision course then it would have been impossible to do anything to stop it.

According to the Planetary Society, only 60% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1.5km have been spotted, meaning that there are still some monsters out there hurtling through space.

According to a recent White House document on asteroid strike preparedness however, the chances of the Earth being hit by one of these objects within the next 100 years is only around 0.01%.

Source: News.com.au | Comments (28)

Tags: Asteroid, Earth