Killer Asteroid Narrowly Misses Collision with Earth

Nothing to see here except a 50-foot asteroid that just narrowly missed crashing into Earth…

By Trevor Dueck — Staff Writer

Remember that movie Deep Impact? It sucked. Anyway, the idea of an asteroid hitting our planet is a tad scary. There was that meteorite that exploded above Russia that provided us with many Youtube videos. That little rock that shot over the city of Chelyabinsk weighed 10,000 tons prior to the blast and about 1,500 people were injured in the explosion, most of them from the shockwave that broke glass.

There was a supposed asteroid which was traveling at slow pace of 16km per second – Sorry I’m Canadian and we use the metric system – was seen by Russian scientists hours before it narrowly missed Earth. Scientists haven’t been able to fully confirm that it was an asteroid as it did a quick flyby of earth and is now gone, however, there was the idea that it could be space debris: a launch-vehicle stage or a piece of an unmanned Mars explorer – I can’t believe that we humans also litter in space. Its trajectory was detected to pass near Mars. However, the search in the space debris catalogue shed no light.

“[The asteroid] was discovered on Friday night by our station near Lake Baikal and nine hours later it flew within 11,300km of the Earth’s surface, below the orbit of geostationary satellites. It was about 15 meters in size,” Vladimir Lipunov of the Moscow State University and the Sternberg Astronomical Institute indicated.

Nothing to panic about. Is it just me or are we starting to see more asteroids nearly missing our planet? Over the next century, astronomers predict many asteroids will pass Earth, with one the closest near-misses expected in April 2029. 99942 Apophis is set to pass 38.5 thousand km from the center of the planet.

Where are Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler when we need them? Is there a plan that maybe NASA has come up with just in case we start seeing some big ones that might make our life a tad more difficult? These are questions that need answering. The Dinosaurs weren’t so lucky were they? It’s time to invest in bomb shelters people!