Asteroid Whizzing By Earth 6 Times Closer Than the Moon (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: The problem with asteroids passing near Earth is that they're often difficult to spot. Fortunately the hardest ones to see in our neighborhood also tend to be the smaller ones. Such is the case with 2017 BH30, which was discovered Sunday by the Catalina Sky Survey just hours before passing by us at the creepy-close distance of only 40,563 miles (65,280 kilometres). This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet (4.6-10 metres) in length, making it somewhere between the size of a truck and a... big truck. That's pretty small by asteroid standards, but it's also the closest spotted asteroid to pass us since September when asteroid 2016 RB1 passed within 24,000 miles (about 39,000 kilometres) of our planet's surface, putting it almost as close as satellites in geosynchronous orbit. This is the third asteroid to buzz by earth closer than the distance to the moon this year. We don't expect a closer pass by one of these visitors until October, when asteroid 2012 TC4 could come more than twice as close.

Comments

Are there more or do we just find more?

[Opportunist]

I can't help it, but those reports have been increasing in numbers rapidly. Either NASA needs money or our detectors have been improving considerably lately.

Re:Are there more or do we just find more?

[goombah99]

well at 40K miles its about 10 earth radii. A dart thrown at that radius has about a 1% chance of intersecting within the earth's atmosphere. Since we haven't had a major earth impact in a couple hundred years one might guess that similarly close events are something like 10,000 years apart if they were random events. Thus observing more than one in your life suggests they are not random.

Re:Are there more or do we just find more?

[skids]

You know, even avoiding mass panic for a mostly-harmless air-burst (or perhaps making nuclear weapons trigger fingers less itchy) with a heads up might be worth it, and, if we did find out with decades of warning, we'd have one hell of a fire under our ass to come up with a solution, so who knows what we might come up with.

Re:Are there more or do we just find more?

[kwiecmmm]

Actually most asteroids orbit the sun and pass by the earth's orbit on the way in and out. So if we found one on the way in that could hit us on the way out, we could do something about it. Or if we determine the orbit could allow it to hit us the next time it comes through then we could do something about it.

Ignoring this would make us no better than the dinosaurs.

Re:6 times closer than the moon?

[Oswald McWeany]

What kind of english is that?

That was my thought too. 1/6 the distance of the moon would make more sense. It's like saying Suzy is twice as skinny as Lucy... it doesn't really make sense even though we know what you mean by it.