Cosmic Close Call

It seems we had a “close encounter” of the potentially nasty kind this week. An asteroid of approximately forty yards diameter zoomed past the Earth this week, coming within 40,000 miles. It may sound like a long ways away, but this is roughly twice the orbit of our geosynchronous satellites and only one seventh of the distance to the moon. In cosmic terms, that’s about as close to a bulls-eye as you get.

How bad would a collision by an asteroid of that size? If it impacts on land, it’s about the same size as the one we believe caused Meteor Crater. If it goes off as an air burst, it’s a bit smaller than the one which gave us the Tunguska Event in 1908, flattening roughly 800 square miles of forest in Siberia. If it hits the ocean, make sure you’re nowhere near the coast that day because there will be a tsunami arriving shortly.

The only really disturbing part of the story is that we didn’t even catch this one until Saturday. That is absolutely no time to do anything about it except watch it fall. One of these days we’re going to get hit again. It might not be for a decade or a century, but it might be this weekend. NASA already has a program in place to search for, identify and track all of these objects, but it remains woefully underfunded every year. Let your representatives know, even as the nation deals with its many other problems, that the NEO needs to be fully funded. We’re only talking about a hundred million dollars here. Come on, folks… we spend more than that on salt marsh harvest mice studies.