Near miss this afternoon

[Analoguesat]

DUCK!!!

An asteroid hurtled past the Earth on Friday in something of a cosmic near-miss, making its closest approach at about 1600 GMT.

The asteroid, estimated to be about 11m (36ft) in diameter, was first detected on Wednesday.

At its closest, the space rock - named 2012 BX34 - passed within about 60,000km of Earth - less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon.


-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16756450

 

[Captain Jack]

An 11 metre rock wouldn't do much damage if it entered the atmosphere. Most of it would burn up anyway, right?

 

[Analoguesat]

Yes chances are it would have burned up. Would have been a very spectacular reentry tho!

 

[Channel Hopper]

An 11 metre rock wouldn't do much damage if it entered the atmosphere. Most of it would burn up anyway, right?

It all depends on the compostion and the trajectory.

A lump which consists mainly of lighter non-metallic compounds would most likely break up well before landing, but the same sized iron rich lump (and therefore far denser) would take a bit more heat to vapourise. Dropping perpendicular through the atmosphere would also create a far shorter path to ground meaning less chance of complete destruction than one that passes at a shallow angle.


There is one close orbit asteroid that, on the next close encounter with the earth could meet up with a gravity path that curves it into a trajectory for a certain impact with the planet. Currently no set of equations in the astronomy circles can calculate the chances with certainty, but from memory the next pass is sometime around 2026, with the potential final run in 2039 or so.

 

[Analoguesat]

It all depends on the compostion and the trajectory.

A lump which consists mainly of lighter non-metallic compounds would most likely break up well before landing, but the same sized iron rich lump (and therefore far denser) would take a bit more heat to vapourise. Dropping perpendicular through the atmosphere would also create a far shorter path to ground meaning less chance of complete destruction than one that passes at a shallow angle.


There is one close orbit asteroid that, on the next close encounter with the earth could meet up with a gravity path that curves it into a trajectory for a certain impact with the planet. Currently no set of equations in the astronomy circles can calculate the chances with certainty, but from memory the next pass is sometime around 2026, with the potential final run in 2039 or so.

That must be the Apophis asteroid.