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Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech
The passage of asteroid 2012 DA14 through the Earth-moon system, is depicted in this handout image from NASA.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500.
Discovered just six days ago, the 460-foot long (140-meter) Asteroid 2013 ET passed about 600,000 miles from Earth at 3:30 p.m. EST. That's about 2-1/2 times as far as the moon, fairly close on a cosmic yardstick.
"The scary part of this one is that it's something we didn't even know about," Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands.
Moving at a speed of about 26,000 miles per hour, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had impacted the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox.
Asteroid 2013 ET is nearly eight times larger than the bus-sized asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15. The force of the explosion, equivalent to about 440 kilotons of dynamite, created a shock wave that shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 1,500 people.
Later that day, another small asteroid, known as DA14, passed about 17,200 miles from Earth, closer than the orbiting networks of communications and weather satellites.
"One of the reasons why we're finding more of these objects is that there are more people looking," Cox said.
Two other small asteroids, both about the size of the Russian meteor, will also be in Earth's neighborhood this weekend. Asteroid 2013 EC 20 passed just 93,000 miles away on Saturday - "a stone's thrown," said Cox.
On Sunday, Asteroid 2013 EN 20 will fly about 279,000 miles from Earth. Both were discovered just three days ago. "We know that the solar system is a busy place," said Cox.
"We're not sitting here on our pale, blue dot on our own in nice safety ... This should be a wakeup call to governments."
NASA has been tasked by the U.S. Congress to find and track all near-Earth objects 0.62 miles or larger in diameter, and estimates about 95 percent have been identified.
However, only about 10 percent of smaller asteroids have been discovered, NASA scientists have said.
The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes of sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.
About 100 tons of material from space hit Earth every day. Astronomers currently expect an object about the size of what hit Russia to strike the planet about every 100 years.
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Nah, the reason more people are reporting seeing things is that the government has slacked off trying to say that anyone who reports seeing anything, is crazy!!! As usual if you really want to know who is at the bottom of 80% of our problems, look no farther than our "friendly" government.
There is nothing like an insane conspiracy theorist to flesh out the very definition of crazy. Well done.
80/20 governs the earth, probably the universe!
Not to mention the ground beef.
Visitors again? And I haven't even had time to clean the house.
DUCK!
Nasa has named this year " The Year of the Comet". Something is disturbing the Asteroids in the Asteroid belt. Alot of them being hurled at earth recently.Coincedence? I think not. I think we can expect alot more, soon. How will they shrug it off if these things start passing bye so often and so close and then start impacting on the surface of the Earth. Nasa knows something is up....
The "Bugs" out of Starship Trooper are redirecting them at Earth. Look out, Rio, here comes yours.
Buenos Aires, actually..extra nerd points to me ;-)
Yes, 'something is up', and I think Obama is behind it. HAHA. "NASA knows something is up?" Funny, could be aliens playing pool and they dont want us betting on it. HA! I think its the Vogons who are about to clear this section of space for a freeway and NASA doesnt want us to panic. (If you dont know who the Vogons are, just google them.)
Eminent domain, and all that!
Yep, sounds like a great time to have NASA focus on being a "cultural outreach program" to our friends in the Middle East. Maybe Prez O should let the agency focus on its original purpose--the EXPLORATION OF SPACE--and not use it as a means for humiliating yet another once-proud symbol of American economic and technological prowess.
Tell your congressman you want NASA to be funded well enough to have a manned as well as robotic DEEP SPACE CAPABILITY to deal with these killer rocks WAY BEFORE they get "discovered" inside the MOON's freakin' orbit!!! Bruce Willis notwithstanding, sounds like we are pretty much DEFENSELESS at this point against anything headed our way...
It's unlikely there's any unusual disturbance to the asteroid belt. A small asteroid passing near the Earth every week or so is expected and consistent with a collision rate of about once per century; it's just that we haven't been able to see most of these asteroids until recently with improvements in telescope and camera technology.
Only a bigot would think that collaboration with middle easterners is humiliating.
Only a bigot would assume that's what I meant.
The STATE DEPARTMENT is the proper venue for diplomacy. The President directing NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden to use NASA resources to "thank our Arab friends" for calculus and higher math is specifically a Marxist dig to "rub our noses in it" that we succeeded where the Marxist Socialist USSR did not. We simply cannot have this symbol of the success of Capitalism and Western Civilization continue this "Colonialist" pride. Read the president's own words in his "Dreams from My Father" if you have any questions on this.
I've had a roommate from Iran during the Hostage Crisis in 1979. I had a roommate from Egypt for TWO YEARS at Michigan State University. I'm certainly not bigoted against people from the Middle East or anyone else.
And, Mr. Raum, you forgot to use the label HATER on anyone YOU HATE who dares to disagree with your learned Liberal opinion...
Bull. There is no evidence that there are more than usual. There are simply more poeple looking for them.
Don't Panic, and don't forget your towel.
Yep - the Vogons are on their way. Just clearing some of those roids out of the way first, before they get around to the real work. ;)
What you have to ask yourself is how often is normal? Heads up evryone.
This being Newsvine, 'normal' doesn't really enter into most discussions here..
It really would seem that Earth is passing through a region of the galaxy thick with asteroids and Comets.
Our number might be up next and it will all be NASA's fault!
Yes, it is. And it has been for several billion years and will be for several billion more.
Only a handful of comets, and no asteroids to my knowledge, have been found in orbits from outside our own solar system. There is an idea that another star could disturb the Oort cloud of comets periodically, but so far there isn't much evidence to support it.
more2bits & okie joe, how right you are. This planet will be hit again. However I do have to wonder if it is really NASA's fault or is it a plot hatched by Al-queda, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the NRA, the Obama administration, the Dumbocrats or the Repuglicans in general, the high school science teacher that you thought was just an old pot head, the guidance councelor that told you there was nothing to worry about or maybe, just maybe, the overweight lunchroom lady. (did I forget anyone?) The possibilities are endless. I might not sleep well tonight!!
ps; forgot the Pee Potty. ;-) ;-)
We're not passing through anything. All these things are already in our Sun's orbit.
Not one serious comment.
There could be four things going on (maybe more than one): 1) Asteroids are swirling around in ways that make their orbit and ours cross path more often than before ; 2) Our solar system is moving around the center of the galaxy, and completes this orbit every 250,000 years. We might be crossing that part of the Milky Way where there are more asteroids. 3) Somebody disturbed the asteroids in the asteroid belt and they are now zooming whichever way they can, some of it directed at earth, more so than before. 4) This is the new anxiety or drama created by space scientists to get more funding.
There are plenty of ways to observe the sky and do research without more money for counting rocks in space. Scientists should stop asking more for this or that so they can put money into Mars program that they can use to migrate out.
I love space research and I am part of it...but there are so many programs within Space research that need attention. Kindly count rocks in more creative ways, and find less expensive ways to keep them away.
Or 5) None of the above. We are encountering no more asteroid/meteor traffic than any other period in our recent past, we just hear about it now. Even 50 years ago we wouldn't have known about any of the misses, only the impacts or air bursts. So, if we didn't hear about them they didn't exist?
Not sure what you would consider to be more "creative," but the asteroids currently being discovered are being found with relatively small wide-field telescopes with modern cameras at a very modest cost. Much more is spent on other forms of astronomical research with large telescopes.
There are uncountable numbers of leftover (from the formation of our solar system) remnants of rock and ice ranging from sand sized to city sized or bigger. They have been in various orbits for billions of years and the orbits are not fixed. The orbits of these bodies hurtling through space change a little each time they complete their journey and can also be changed as they pass through the gravitational fields of planets or the sun, or each other.
The bulk of these remnants, when the solar system was young, not only crashed into all of the moons, planets and the sun as can be seen by the craters visible on many of our solar system's bodies, but were the very things that formed them. What we have now is the remainder that have yet to crash into something. Fear not, a lot of them will eventually find something to crash into as time passes.
The asteroid that recently passed earth can not have passed without being affected by earth's gravity which has altered its course a little so that on its next trip around, it will not pass in the same trajectory as it just did. It may come closer or farther away or because of its altered trajectory, may hit another planet, the sun or never hit anything. Who really knows?
But something huge will eventually hit our planet. Don't let that idea make you lose any sleep because if it hits near you, you probably won't even notice.
For you people who suggest a conspiracy, please chill out. NASA and space flight has nothing to do with it. It is just a natural phenomenon. So please take the aluminum foil off your heads and get some rest.
But I thought Jeebuses dad blinked his eyes like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeanie and the entire Universe magically appeared just as we see it today, the Earth perfectly suited to house microscopic carbon copies of himself (us), and the stars there only for us to look at in awe?
And to think, it was all created 6,017 years, 4 months and 16 days ago, finished at 10:00 a.m. EST, complete with galaxies that are so far away it has taken 13.7 billion of those 365.25-day years to reach us. Amazing. I have learned to do the "gazinta's", but still haven't gotten the hang of doin' the "let there be's".
Please understand that the frequency of these asteroids within our solar system actually represents a very serious danger that a future collision with NEOs like Apophis is a real possibility, which in turn could put the asteroid Apophis on a future collision course with Earth in 2029. For this reason I really don't think mankind should be lulled into complacency by these predictions of near misses by space agencies like NASA / JPL. We really need to get ready to repel these monstrous space bodies, and IMO we need to get ready FAST, if only because the ET installed religious "Book of Revelations" actually predicts a future massive collision by an asteroid with Earth which opens up a future supervolcano here on Earth (the so called "Lake of Fire"), into which all unbelievers are one day to be thrown alive when Jesus Christ inaugurates his future thousand year totalitarian theocratic kingdom here on Earth! - Rick Carter
Have I been in the least little way remiss in my responsibilities to the human race, FGPs & UFPs, when it comes to alerting them to all of these potential imminent dangers ??? Then please don't be remiss in your (combined) responsibilities to me, either, okey-dokey? Thanks! - RC
(In light of all that I am up against, I would be 'qualifiably' insane to be doing this if I weren't actually depending upon you all, God have mercy on me.) - RC
I even recommended a potential solution to all of these deadly fascist threats which are circulating through our human world, which was to reform or edit these dangerous ET designed and installed terminal religious belief systems in our world according to a future international standard for all religion in our world, which requires that all religion in our world fully respect modern day human rights, civil rights, and internationally accepted mental health standards. Was I ever publicly seconded by anyone out there in the entire human world? Not that I am personally aware of. - RC
Don't you all realize that you all are an inevitable part of the equation of what is going on in this tragic world, whether you all like it or not, if only on the basis of your failure to act? Indeed, over time you inevitably become a refutation to me as well, if only due to your lack of actions in response to all that I am sharing. So exactly how long will your (combined or collective) consciences allow you all to continue to do this? - RC
$#!t happens...
Um, instead of blogging and answering your own blogs, maybe you should GOOGLE AND E-MAIL YOUR CONGRESSMAN! I'm going to this afternoon.
If we aren't smart enough to figure out that it IS in our collective enlightened self interest to have a ROBUST MANNED AND ROBOTIC Deep Space capability, then maybe we SHOULD go the way of the dinosaurs.
NASA's ENTIRE BUDGET is still less than a SINGLE CATEGORY of FARM SUBSIDY that funds growing corn which we no longer need, and which will either fund ETHANOL for fuel (Energy return on investment EROI = 1.25 which means we USE a gallon of fuel to produce 1.25 gallons of ethanol for fuel) or high fructose CORN SYRUP which essentially subsidizes ADM and other giant corporations and fuels the OBESITY/DIABETES EPIDEMIC raging across the developed world.
Hmmmm, Lessee... Funding our demise through subsidizing corn-syrup and therefore diabetes or funding our capability for defending ourselves against the next Shoemaker-Levy 9 planet-killer headed our way?
NAH, what am I talking about?? Go back to ESPN2 and drool over the next draft pick while munching on subsidized corn-chips. Nothing to see here folks...
Look at the surface of the Moon. Mercury . Mars. What do you see ? Thousands upon thousands of impact craters. Thanks to water-driven erosional geology , Earth " erases" it's craters in a relatively short period of time...there are only about 175 visible meteoridal craters across our globe. Some, however, are quite large...
http://maps.thefullwiki.org/Impact_crater
It's just a matter of time .
My Snark of the Day : why isn't the Westboro Baptist Church out there protesting the asteroid detection observatories, because asteroid impacts are God's Will ? Carrying signs that say " God Hates Scientists "...
Dewdle, I can only agree that our friends from Westboro Baptist Church are more than a little beyond the pale. If I'm understanding them correctly, they stage outrageous protests to draw attention to themselves and to issues of concern to them. As a military veteran and a Christian, I find their protests at funerals of soldiers viciously cruel and beyond inappropriate. Families and communities need respectful support at that time. It's curious that the empathy and support comes in the form of the veteran bikers who circle around the burial site, rev their bikes, and thus drown out the foolishness of the Westboro types. I can only shake my head and pray for them.
If there's a point of reflection, it would be to ask what drives these people. They seem to be protesting the progressive slide of our culture into what they consider perversion. Any deviation from monogamous heterosexual marriage, whether enshrined by law or accepted as the societal norm, seems to trigger their seemingly hateful protests, against government policy as well as societal decline.
The only parallel I can come up with was from a fairly recent Star Trek movie. Don't know if you saw Star Trek Insurrection, where officials of the Federation found themselves in cahouts with F. Murray Abraham's character who was planning to "vacuum up" whatever magic particles kept this idealized planet civilization forever young. You may recall that it was Data whose behavior became bizarre when he couldn't rationalize between the orders he was given by Starfleet and whatever ethics programming was zipping around in his "positronic brain" or whatever. Data wound up "breaking curtain" and getting out of his "stealth suit" thus revealing the "duck blind" that the Federation had set up on this planet. Picard and crew eventually wound up siding with Data, hence the "Insurrection" title, and exposing this Federation plan as unethical and morally unacceptable.
Perhaps, in a bizarre way, the Westboro folks are reacting to something the rest of us take for granted. Maybe, just maybe, not all "progressivism" represents progress in a way that is desirable for the long term. The more society "progresses" away from The Old Book, the more people will find they cannot just "go with the flow" anymore. The History Channel series on The Bible (Sunday nights and throughout the week) seems to reflect a deep need in society to return to values and meanings that have been intentionally eschewed by the Political Atheism of Marx so prevalent on our college campuses.
Does God hate scientists? I kinda doubt it. Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with Biblical Eschatology, the end-times. Dalton, Farraday, and numerous Enlightenment scientists were devout Christian orthodox believers. For them, the universe was understandable by rational beings because they believed it was the product of a rational Mind.
The American Scientific Affiliation is a Christian Fellowship for science researchers who are Evangelical Christians. Their worldviews and cosmology are likely as varied as you'd find on any secular campus. They hold in common that Ultimate Being invaded history in the person of Y'Shua, Jesus, on a rescue mission to save us mostly from ourselves. I doubt very seriously that "God Hates Scientists" regardless of what our friends from Westboro come up with for "signage."
The Proverbs tell us scientists actually pursue what used to be reserved for royalty:
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings." [Proverbs 25:2, New International Version, The Holy Bible]
Dewdle, very cool wiki on impact craters on earth. I'm sure more will be discovered over time. The Tunguska event certainly comes to mind in this context. Here's an excerpt from a NASA website:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30jun_tunguska/
"A century later some still debate the cause and come up with different scenarios that could have caused the explosion," said Yeomans. "But the generally agreed upon theory is that on the morning of June 30, 1908, a large space rock, about 120 feet across, entered the atmosphere of Siberia and then detonated in the sky."
It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500
degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.
"That is why there is no impact crater," said Yeomans. "The great majority of the asteroid is consumed in the explosion."
Yeomans and his colleagues at JPL's Near-Earth Object Office are tasked with plotting the orbits of present-day comets and asteroids that cross Earth's path, and could be potentially hazardous to our planet. Yeomans estimates that, on average, a Tunguska-sized asteroid will enter Earth's atmosphere
once every 300 years.”
My God,,, don't encourage them!!!
Yep, sounds like a great time to have NASA focus on being a "cultural outreach program" to our friends in the Middle East. Maybe Prez O should let the agency focus on its original purpose--the EXPLORATION OF SPACE--and not use it as a means for humiliating yet another once-proud symbol of American economic and technological prowess.
Tell your congressman you want NASA to be funded well enough to have a manned as well as robotic DEEP SPACE CAPABILITY to deal with these killer rocks WAY BEFORE they get "discovered" inside the MOON's freakin' orbit!!! Bruce Willis notwithstanding, sounds like we are pretty much DEFENSELESS at this point against anything headed our way...
The Oort cloud and the "ass-teroid" belt have been throwin' big rocks at us for a few billion years. Apparently their aim ain't very good, but they get a hit once in awhile. So, maybe we'll be annihilated, maybe not. If we are, our worries are over. If not, we can continue to come up with stuff to be "scared" of. But, probably, life will go on somewhere, and animals somewhere will continue eating other animals and plants, pooping, and fertilizing plants.
It's sad when the bulk of the world puts it's faith in mythological creatures to preserve their place in the Universe. The dinosaurs probably did the same thing and look at what happened to them.
Um, instead of blogging and answering your own blogs, maybe you should GOOGLE AND E-MAIL YOUR CONGRESSMAN! I'm going to this afternoon.
If we aren't smart enough to figure out that it IS in our collective enlightened self interest to have a ROBUST MANNED AND ROBOTIC Deep Space capability, then maybe we SHOULD go the way of the dinosaurs.
NASA's ENTIRE BUDGET is still less than a SINGLE CATEGORY of FARM SUBSIDY that funds growing corn which we no longer need, and which will either fund ETHANOL for fuel (Energy return on investment EROI = 1.25 which means we USE a gallon of fuel to produce 1.25 gallons of ethanol for fuel) or high fructose CORN SYRUP which essentially subsidizes ADM and other giant corporations and fuels the OBESITY/DIABETES EPIDEMIC raging across the developed world.
Hmmmm, Lessee... Funding our demise through subsidizing corn-syrup and therefore diabetes or funding our capability for defending ourselves against the next Shoemaker-Levy 9 planet-killer headed our way?
NAH, what am I talking about?? Go back to ESPN2 and drool over the next draft pick while munching on subsidized corn-chips. Nothing to see here folks...
These asteroids didn't just now start their flybys. This has been going on forever, but scientists with plenty of government grant money to play with super cool toys are just now reporting them. That just means the government grants are about to run out and they need more money.
Are you trying to tell us we shouldn't renew grants to find potentially dangerous asteroids? The amount of funding is really pretty small. The real money (and likely more debate) will come when we start planning space missions that would have the capability of deflecting asteroids.
It all comes back to politics and policies, so my apologies in advance. I don't hear the President or anyone else discussing entitlements (2/3 of our discretionary spending) which subsidizes government programs which bribe the dependent and the gullible to VOTE DEMOCRAT.
Axelrod's strategy which won Prez O "four more years" came from an Irish Playwright, Fabian Socialist and co-founder of the London School of Economics:
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of
Paul." – George Bernard Shaw [www.lpboulder.org/quotes]
So, will funding NASA buy the election for Democrats? Nope. But it may guarantee that there WILL BE more elections in the future...
This excites me, the more the better,keep looking up people, you will feel better.
Cool and the ship should be right behind it. Everyone get the tin foil suits, and kool aid ready.
Based upon how quickly we are screwing up the earth, as well as generating religious hate between certain groups, I suspect we humans will destroy ourselves before an asteroid will.
The best way to protect ourselves from asteroids to to start mining asteroids. Mine them for every last particle and use the materials to build space stations and craft to navigate the solar system. Mine them to build more mining and processing craft. Every mined asteroid in an Earth-crossing orbit is one less threat to Earth.