Picard to the rescue!
Posted on 11/04/2011 12:09:23 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A huge asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the moon on Tuesday, giving scientists a rare chance for study without having to go through the time and expense of launching a probe, officials said.
Earth's close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST on Tuesday, as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles from the planet.
"It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great -- and rare -- chance to study a near-Earth object like this," astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, ..
The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon," Yeomans said.
Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55's approach, which will be visible from the planet's northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.
"The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States," Yeomans said. ...
Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.
"These sorts of events have been happening for most of the lifetime of the Earth, about 4.5 billion years," Fisher said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Is this the asteroid the Japanese are going to blast? I thought I read that somewhere.
I just wish we were at the level where we could have nudged it into a stable Earth orbit as a 2nd moon/mining colony.
And no one knows how all these asteroids were made. It’s a rock. Did it spontaneously coalesce? Unlikely. Has to be from a bigger body.
Maybe it’ll bring back the dinosaurs!
“mining colony”
It’s 1000 feet wide. One guy and a pick?
It does. The curvature of the trajectory at that scale should be imperceptible.
Get ready for the .... zombies.
Oops!
I totally thought it said 1000 miles.
Picard to the rescue!
We are all going to die! In less than 125 years, every man, woman and child now living on Earth will be dead!!!
It’s Bush’s fault. Women and minorities will be hardest hit.
Yeah...just wait until it starts decelerating!
Remember that Government often awards contacts based on the low bid... What could possibly go wrong :^)
The denizens of the fifth rock from the sun pissed the Martians off. They kept landing junk on the Martians planet...
I guess you didn't get the memo; the latest computer models prove that asteroid impacts are caused by global warming.
If NASA held a news conference on Saturday afternoon and announced that this asteriod was going to slam into the New York metropolitan area on Tuesday morning, on Saturday night CBS News would have as the lead story, “Herman Cain Facing Sexual Harassment Charges.”
“For Gawds Sakes! Somebody do something!!!!”
If it hits, hopefully it hits Pelosi’s district or georgetown.
Is Farrakan preping?
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