Posted on 05/03/2014 5:11:16 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Don't worry, NASA's known about it for ages. Like, four whole days.
So heres a fun fact: while you were sleeping last night, you had a near-death experience. Yes, you and everyone else on this lovely planet. In the wee hours of the morning, a pretty sizeable asteroid soared by the Earth, just missing it. But were okay. For now.
At 4:13am EDT, asteroid 2014 HL129 essentially side-swiped the Earth, coming within 186,000 miles of our planet. For reference, the moon is 238,855 miles away. Which means the asteroid was much, much closer to us than the moon will ever be. And the moon is pretty damn close. Like, we-sent-people-there-in-the-60s close.
Oh, and why is it called 2014 HL129? Its because we pretty much just discovered that this asteroid exists. Yep, a rock that NASAs Asteroid Watch says was about 25 feet wide (approximately the size of a bus) and came within space-moments of smacking our planet around was completely unknown until April 28th. Four days ago. But no big deal guys, no need to panic. Were fine.
Just know planet-wide destruction could be under a week away and we could have no idea. Neato.
(Excerpt) Read more at geekosystem.com ...
You’re absolutely right, the search for sun-side objects mostly has to be conducted using radio telescopes.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=8#8
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=10#10
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=15#15
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=23#23
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=30#30
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3151845/posts?page=32#32
The bigger question: if a NEO shaves us, does it take some of our atmosphere with it? Of course it does.
An Asteroid The Size Of A Bus Came Closer To Earth Than The Moon This Morning...
The wheels on the astroid go round and round, round and round, round and round,!
The amount would be miniscule, unless the object were big enough to also warp the crust of the Earth, in which case, we wouldn’t be too worried about atmosphere. :’)
Was this anthropromorphic asteroidism? I mean, it was probably the Koch Bros looking to score a free bus, without having to pay any taxes on it, right?
Kevlar?
Could have been...
It was about the size of a cigarette case and shiny.
Maybe it was from Area 51.
I get the feeling that you are trying to tell me something......
I am still fixated on the planet-wide destruction caused by Baraq Obama.
What I wonder is if the stuff we are seeing are the earlier fragments of some big BLAST and that the ‘main body’ are hurtling toward us like a massive birdshot blast?
The Solar System used to be thought of as a nice, orderly thing, with the somewhat messy asteroids confined to a band between Jupiter and Mars, and the only period of impacts on Earth confined to the Late Heavy Bombardment. In that view, all other debris had either been absorbed by the planets near the beginning of the Solar System, or ejected from the Solar System by interaction with Jupiter. Ah, those were the days. ;’)
There’s just a lot of crud on eccentric orbits, including stuff that is outside the plane of the ecliptic, and from time to time (again, random intervals) it gets to the same place as something else and at the same time, and kablooey. The Earth gets hit fairly often:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3149687/posts?page=37#37
Until Eugene Shoemaker studied Meteor (Barringer) Crater after WWII, hardly anyone accepted its actual origin, which is impact. Impact craters, where noticed at all, were classified as “cryptovolcanic”, meaning, this is a crater, must have been caused by a volcano, but we can’t figure out how it happened.
After Shoemaker’s breakthrough, there was still stone silence for the most part; he and Carolyn went to Germany on vacation, but mostly to check out the Ries Basin, a 15 mile wide impact crater. Almost smack in the middle of it is Nordlinger, where Shoemaker found a cathedral built of the local stone, which was chock full of coezite, and coezite is only formed by impact.
After *that* paper was published, people started to recognize impact craters all over the place, including large ones like Manicougan. As orbit was reached and used to study the Earth’s surface, more craters were found. The Haughton Astrobleme in Canada has been dated to about 22 million years, the Ries impact about 14-15 million years old. Both of these were serious at the time, and caused some changes to taxa, but not to the level of the mass extinction events at the major paleontological boundaries.
:’) The Area 51 anomalous material isn’t mylar, or kevlar. (’:
It was easier for me just to paste links to the earlier replies and such. :’)
We’ll know next week, when Dingy Harry condemns this, their latest unamerican plot!!!
Yeah, but they were hollow and made of aluminum foil, not solid iron.
Possibly amusing ping.
There’s also a difference between destruction of the planet - even just most of its surface - and destruction across the planet.
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