Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Asteroid passes just 8,700miles from Earth - with only 15 hours warning

I'm sure this was Bush's fault...

Although no one noticed at the time, the Earth was almost hit by an asteroid last Friday. The previously undiscovered asteroid came within 8,700miles of Earth but astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before it made its closest approach.
Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the Moon, which is 250,000 miles away.

Happens all the time, they only hit every several million years though

What's the diameter of the earth?

That was close...


As Jack Horkheimer always says, "keep looking up"!

No doubt it will be back.

Well just the fact that it was 1/30th of the orbit to the moon is pretty close.

How big was it?

Came within 8700 miles of Washington Dc. Eh.....

Well, it was only like 23 feet across but at mach 10 or whatever the speed was, that still a lot of kinetic energy.

Hmmm...not an extinction event but could have been pretty bad depending on where it hits. Meteor Crater, Arizona was supposedly made by a 150 foot diameter body. Here's a link to the opinions on the damage it caused:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kri...opages/Barringer/barringerstartpage.html

It missed us by approximately 1x the width of the planet, if I recall the dimensions correctly.

That's DAMN close!

Look at how the trajectory was altered. A little slower it might have acheived orbit.

150 ft diameter would have about 300 times more kinetic energy than 23 ft if they had roughly the same velocity. It would probably ruin the day for about 10 acres of houses though.

plug the info into this Calculator to see how bad it would be.

How large would it have been when it actually hit the ground? Articles I have read indicate that most of it would have burnt up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground...

tunguska never hit the ground,either.

of course not. Tunguska was the result of a test shot from the Death Star.

it actually was on a collision course but bruce willis deflected its path with a rail gun.

How close did it come to taking out Mecca?

That was close.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page here. This site lists the near earth asteroids that we know about, their size, and how close they come to earth every month.

That was the "fouler" shot. Wait'll the five-shot group comes ...

Yeah, and the worst they can do is cause a mass extinction of most higher organisms. But as long as some smaller organisms survive, evolution will reproduce a full collection of new and exotic species within just a few million years. Nothing to worry about.