Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth

lmcl writes "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."

Comments

Thank god...

[pVoid]

and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by

Thank god it was spotted after the fact, or else we would have had another stupid media frenzy that would draw attention away from more important matters, like friggin this, this, or this. Media man, it's like a toy for an ADD child.

Re:too many asteroids these days?

[kfg]

Through a study of physics, astronomy and cosmology.

The two objects had no relationship to each other. They were on totally dissimilar paths, made of different materials and of obvious divergent origin. In fact, only one of them was an asteroid.

An asteroid is orbital, just like a planet (asteroids are also called "minor planets"), and behaves like a planet. Once detected its behaviour is highly predictable.

The other was a meteor. Space junk. A rock. Very possibly a comet fragment but being hit by such a fragment means little about the odds of ever being hit by the comet it came from, which may well be tens of thousands of years away from coming anywhere near earth. There is a small army of astronomers, both professional and amatuer, watching for incoming comets because they're neat and get named after you if you see it first.

Tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. It isn't indicitive of anything much other than there's lots of stuff out there and a lot of it hits us.

Some of the stuff that hits us is clearly related to other stuff that hits us.Meteor showers are such related stuff. Some of the stuff is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff.

These two things don't happen to have any relationship to each other, and thus have no joint relationship to some third object.

This is not to say that something big isn't on a collision course with earth at some future point. In fact such an event seems highly likely at some future time.

It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.

Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.

KFG