Asteroid Flies Under the Radar, Literally

mrn121 writes "Space.com is reporting that a 16-foot wide asteriod has passed the Earth in a phenomenally close call. The Asteroid, named 2004 YD5, passed just below the 22,300 mile range where geostationary satellites sit. What makes the incident most interesting is that the asteriod was not seen until after it passed the Earth, due to the well-known Cosmic Blind Spot caused by the Sun."

Comments

Re:First post

[Laivincolmo]

NASA's Deep Impact is going to impact a comet to study the composition of it. If sucessful the impact will create a crater on the surface. It has little to do with breaking up asteroids.

asteroid, meteor, meteoroid, meteorite

[Animaether]

Just to correct something...

Asteroid:
Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers. Also called minor planet, planetoid.
I.E. still in space and orbiting.

Meteor:
A bright trail or streak that appears in the sky when a meteoroid is heated to incandescence by friction with the earth's atmosphere. Also called falling star, meteor burst, shooting star.
I.E. that which is shooting through the atmosphere, heating it and itself up in the process due to friction.

Meteoroid:
A solid body, moving in space, that is smaller than an asteroid and at least as large as a speck of dust.
I.E. still in space, not necessarily orbiting, smaller than an Asteroid. I think you meant this one.

Meteorite:
A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to the earth's surface from outer space.
I.E. Fallen onto the Earth. It's what you may find if you're either lucky, or very observant.

So just to conclude.. this is indeed a Meteoroid, as it's not big enough to actually be an Asteroid. But it's more fun to say, and less confusing to the masses - especially the Nintendo owners out there.

Re:meh

[jc42]

Yeah. A couple years ago, I ran across an article that contained a graph of object size versus frequency of entering the Earth's atmosphere. The 1-per-day frequency was for objects of about 3 meters diameter.

Several objects of this thing's size enter our atmosphere each week. Most of them disintegrate in the atmostphere. A few have pieces that hit the ground, though they're usually rather small by the time they (or the pieces) hit.

To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across. Of course, one of those may hit us next week. Or 10,000 years from now. (Or both. ;-)

I wonder if I could find that graph again?