Dangerous asteroid buzzed by Earth, will return

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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,503164,00.html

Summary:
This ~200-ft space rock which zoomed by us 40,000 miles overhead would have produced the equivalent of a "large nuclear blast" if it hit Earth, and we only had 3 days' notice!
Plus, Earth's gravity is going to pull it back toward us.
Great.

In other words, "We Dodged the Bullet ... This Time."

Has anyone ever noticed how Fox News is long on providing fear-inspiring factoids, but short on providing news we can actually use?

Not meaning to feed the paranoia of those afraid of cosmic cataclysms, but these things happen all the time - check spaceweather.com and at the bottom of the page there is a list of known neos and how close they came/will come to the earth. (Note "LD" is the distance from the earth to the moon.) I think the closest one I noticed was a year or two ago one passed at 0.1 LD (which is pretty darned close!), but I could be remembering it wrong.

It's Bread and Circuses Time all over again.

Could be worse...

Sooner or later (much later I hope) the Earth is going to get his with a rock as big as the one the killed the dinosaurs. It is just a matter of time.

ruveyn

Not necessarily, actually, ruveyn. Most of the sizable debris was cleared out of the inner system millions of years ago - primarily by impacting on one of the inner planets, to be sure (take a look at Tycho Crater sometime - that looks like it must have durned near cracked the Moon in half!). Dinosaur-Killers now would have to be aimed toward the inner system from somewhere way out by the Kuiper Belt, and you'd think that if that were going to happen, it would have by now. (Unless, of course, the mysterious planet Nemesis actually exists, and is at least a gas giant [as depicted in Niven and Pournelle's novel Lucifer's Hammer].)

Of course, it wouldn't take a mile-wide asteroid striking an ocean target to really spoil our collective day...

[quote="DeaconBlues"]

The Oort cloud and Kuyper belt are vast and there are millions if not billions of large rocks that might get bumped in our direction. And Jupiter might not catch them all. It is a matter of when, not if. Hopefully, some of the human race will find a livable place either in orbit or somewhere in the solar system. That way a big rock will not render the human species extinct.

ruveyn

"The Earth is too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

- Robert Heinlein

Has anyone thought of going up there and nuking it to save Earth from destruction, like in Armageddon?

Maybe if NASA hadn't decided to basically abandon manned spaceflight after Project Apollo, limiting our excursions to Low Earth Orbit, we might have the capability to do something like that. As it stands, however, we can't, not unless someone's willing to devote Apollo- or Manhattan-Project-style levels of money and effort to the cause.