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Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight
jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."
The problem is that when you say something is 540,000km away, the huge general population tunes out. That's an ASTRONOMICAL number by most considerations, so nobody gives two shits. Except, as it turns out, we're dealing with astronomy, so astronomical numbers are the norm. The fact that nobody is really considering funding a worldwide effort to try and map all the objects that could potentially cause a major threat is disturbing. Hillary voted for $1 Million for a Woodstock museum - doesn't it make more sense to fund a huge, cheap project that could potentially help save the entire Earth from annihilation than a museum about a rockin' sex-fest? The latter doesn't really seem up most of congress' alley, but yet they vote that way.
NASA needs to spearhead projects that are useful, in collaboration with the rest of the space-viewing world. The fact that there isn't a loud voice shouting about this concept to the pols is embarrassing.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
From TFA:
"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."
Verbum caro factum est
What do you choose to spend your money on?
Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?
It was nice knowing us!
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