An asteroid passed between the earth and the moon on
Friday, but NASA didn't find out about it until Thursday (or if
they did, they didn't tell us). If it had impacted, it could have
destroyed a major city. Maybe we'd get better information if
some of our scientists were honest about
what's
really going on out there.
Msn.com spotted a Twitter on Friday from a member of
NASA's Asteroid Watch Team that said, "That's slightly closer
than the orbit of our moon." Our so-called Asteroid Watch
Team isn't doing much careful "watching!"
In Space.com, Tariq Malik quotes Don Yeomans, manager of
the Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL (which is part of
NASA), as saying, "You'd expect an object of this size to fly
within the orbit of the moon every few days or so." He admits
that most of them simply aren't spotted: "There're about 7
million of these objects in the near-Earth space; needless to
say we have discovered only a small fraction of them."
When Malik asks Yeomans "So what would happen if an
object like this did strike?" his reply is, "If it's typical density,
it would create a 4 kiloton explosion in the Earth's
atmosphere if it were to hit, which of course it won't." But he
DOES admit that an asteroid this size hits the Earth once
every seven years or so (usually landing harmlessly in the
ocean). According to Yeomans, "They're sort of Mother
Nature's way of shooting a few across the bow to make sure
we pay attention." Let's hope that's what NASA is doing but
so far, it doesn't seem that way!
It could be a close call for us if that space rock called the
recession hits us even harder
that it already has. In that case, we simply may not be here
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