Asteroid misses Earth by miles

[Champagne]

268,624 miles to be precise. Which is almost as close as the moon. The half-mile wide asteroid was noted as a PHA (potentially hazardous asteroid).

So just how often does the Earth get hit by asteroids?

[gerkin]

Not often enough. It would be one hell of a fireworks display (and maybe the last)

[Clanad]

Depends on definitions, actually, i.e.; Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive body, composed of rock, carbon or metal, which is orbiting the Sun., whereas, a Meteoroid: A small particle from an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun and a Meteorite: A meteoroid that survives its passage through the Earth's atmosphere and impacts the Earth's surface.. so, on that basis, the Earth is struck by very small asteroids on a daily, if not hourly basis...

[ianess]

Two good answers.
You just have to look at the surface of the moon to see the damage they can cause. A big one is bound to impact this planet sometime and nearly all life [of any sort] will be wiped out.
Apparently we can only see those that are illuminated by the sun, and as we can't look into the sun we can't see what's coming from that direction.
It's happened before and it'll happen again......just don't lose sleep worrying about it.

[jake-the-peg]

This all kicked off in 1989 when an asteroid called 1989FC and another called Toutatis (a few years later) came within half a million miles of us - We only saw them after they passed!

Toutatis was 4 Km in size. If the Tunguska event
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event )
was as may believe a meteorite it was about 0.5 Km

That was a 10-15 megaton explosion distroying 2,500 square Kilometers of Siberia - Imagine Toutatis hitting the US or western Europe!

That rather stopped what has been called "the giggle factor" with regards to discussion of the so called NEOs (near eartjh objects) and a lot of very serious people do loose sleep over it .

Here you can see NASA's page
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
you'll notice that most of the impact probabilities are e-06 or millions to one against but my aren't there a lot of them!
still most are blue (less than 50m across)

Have a look too at the close approaches page.

A Tunguska sized event probably happens every 200 years or so

[Champagne]

Wow Jake, what an interesting site! Thank you. x

[Disposition]

I'm sure America has enough hidden weapons to dispose of any asteroids heading our way big enough to leave a mark.

[XxHeatherxX]

Blaah. (POO FACE).

[londonpete]

Apparently this asteroid which missed the Earth by miles has been renamed the Lampard Comet , after his performances in the World Cup.