asteroid

So last Friday a great big hunk of rock with the un-interesting name of 2012-DA14 flew close to the Earth.

Of course "close" is still a pretty long way away on human scale, but on the scale of the solar system it grazed past us Matrix-bullet-time-stylee.  Indeed, unless I'm a bit off, it actually came well within the orbit of many satellites, so it really was close.

Oddly I heard a lot of reports in the media that it was a record close encounter for an asteroid of this size.  This of course is wrong - the closest encounters are when asteroids actually hit us - then the encounter is 0m!

What they mean of course is it was a recorded for the closest recorded.  There could have been plenty that have zipped by us but these things are not really big enough to be seen with the naked eye so you need things like telescopes which we've not had for very long and of course you need to be looking in the right direction.

This one was 46m across which is pretty big.  Apparently it's of a similar size to the meteor that exploded over Tunguska and flattened a huge swathe of trees.  Although big a lot of an asteroid generally gets burned up in the atmosphere (angles depending) so it wouldn't be big enough to cause us to go extinct if it hit, but it would make a hell of a mess if it hit a city or landed in the ocean and caused a big tsunami.

I watched a bit of the NASA live webcast feed.  I did pop my head out to see if it might be possible to see anything but it had unfortunately clouded over so I couldn't have seen anything.

The weirdest bit of the story was that a smaller meteor hit Russia on the same day.  It was nothing more than a coincidence but this was a lot smaller but caused a lot of injuries as it hit a fairly built up area as I understand it.  It just shows you how much damage, particularly if there was little warning, and there are a lot of hunks of rock up there.

It should be a bit of an interesting time in the heavens this year as there's a comet due later in the year that may give something of a spectacular display... or maybe not, they're not quite sure if it will produce a tail or not.