Asteroid 4179 Toutatis Will Miss Earth, This Time

EtherAlchemist writes "National Geographic News reports in this story that a giant, peanut shaped asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will pass within 1 million miles of Earth on Weds, the 29th. When it does, it will be the closest any known object of this size (3 miles) has passed near Earth in this century. No worry about impact yet, it should pose no threat until at least 2562. An interesting note: the asteroid believed to have caused Earth's biggest mass extinction is thought to have been between 3.7 and 7.5 miles as reported here in 2001." 2004 FU162 came closer, but is a much smaller object.

Comments

Re:Wow, the biggest this century!!!

[pbranes]

Actually, asteroids coming near the earth are pretty common. Check out the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_impacts

However, our current programsto track asteroids that might hit the earth is extremely limited.

Not especially close

[yellowstone]

The mean distance between the Earth and moon is 384,400 kilometers. 1,000,000 miles is about 1,609,000 kilometers, so the asteroid will come within about 4.2 earth-moon distances.

Learn all about Near-Earth Objects

[CompSurfer]

NASA's NEO (Near Earth Object) program tracks many different objects, though I wish they had a bigger budget, then they could handle even more.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[Waffle Iron]

You do realise surely that 1000 small asteroids is a lot better than 1 large asteroid, right? The effect of 1000 small chunks would be greatly reduced due to them burning up faster while descending through the atmosphere.

1000 pieces of a 3-mile asteroid are each 0.3 miles (0.5km) in diameter. The atmosphere is barely going to singe a rock of that size before it impacts.

Even if were blown to tiny pieces, that wouldn't help. Scientific American had a recent article that hypothesized that one of the worst parts of a big impact is the rebound of billions of tiny fragments into space, which then rain down all over the globe. Each one burns up individually, but the overall effect heats the entire atmosphere to hundreds of degrees, incinerating just about everything on the planet.

Sliced big or small, that much mass coming in from outer space would be a major problem.

Astronomers would learn a lot if it hit the moon

[billstewart]

If something that big hit the Earth, it would release a huge amount of debris into the atmosphere, affecting solar energy absorbtion/reflection, maybe doing a nuclear-winter-style cooling, affecting clouds, possibly causing chemical-related problems depending on what it threw around, making a big atmospheric shock wave that would devaste everything in a huge radius around it, cause lots of fires, and cause a big earthquake which might trigger more quakes, etc.,

But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere or oceans, so most of those things simply won't happen - lots of dust goes ballistic and lands, a chunk of the moon's surface gets vaporized (ok, causing a temporary localized atmosphere of sorts, but not enough to care about), and the dust covers some existing craters, but if there's a new crater on a side of the moon we can see, maybe it'd be deep enough to get some real insight about the inside of the moon.

Certainly lots of business for astronomers for a while. It'd be much more annoying if it hit the far side of the moon where we can only see it from spaceships.