That was really really close.
 

The scary part is no one saw it coming.



PASADENA, Calif. - A 100-foot-diameter asteroid passed close but harmlessly by Earth on Thursday, astronomers said.

The hurtling rock passed about 26,500 miles above the southern Atlantic Ocean at 2:08 p.m. PST.

It was the closest recorded encounter between Earth and an asteroid, said Steven Chesley, an astronomer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who works on a program looking for such objects.

Such encounters, however, are actually believed to occur at the rate of one every two years and have simply not been detected, he said.

"There certainly have been closer encounters that we didn't know about," he added.

Astronomers were continuing to observe the asteroid, 2004 FH, which was expected to be beyond the moon's orbit by early Friday.

It won't come fairly close to Earth again until 2044, when it will be within 930,000 miles.

Chesley said there was a lingering chance, on the order of one in a million, that it could hit sometime in the future, but that possibility is expected to be eliminated as its orbit is further refined.

The asteroid was close enough to Earth on Thursday to be visible through binoculars from vantage points in the southern hemisphere, Asia and Europe, Chesley said.

If it had hit Earth it likely would have broken up in the atmosphere. Its shock wave could have been strong enough to break windows on the ground, but nothing like the disastrous climate-changing effects that could result from the impact of an asteroid more than a half-mile in diameter, he said.

Astronomers had to scramble to observe 2004 FH because it was only discovered late Monday during a survey by two telescopes in New Mexico.

No danger. Move along.

And even if there was a close one no one would know until... BOOOOOM

id sue the fuckers if i got hit with one lol :winkwink:

We are just fleas on a rock hurling through space man.

as intelligent and as rich as some of us are, it doesnt change what we really are.

parasites on a balloon.

damn i wonder what kind of damage it would of created if it actually hit earth. id be armageddon

Wasnt this the asteriod that they knew about 2 days in advance but decided to hold off on alerting the public because they wanted to avoid creating a hysteria as they better calculated its orbit?

LOL, the way these astronmers play it down is fucked up.

One astronmer on CNN just said it would have probably just exploded above ground and not impacted. Then he said it would have been like a small quarter megaton bomb.

Let's do the math.

A quarter megaton would be 250,000 tons of TNT which means we're talking about only 500 Million pounds of TNT.

Yeh, that's the ticket. I sure as hell wouldn't want that going off in the sky above where I lived.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

yeah they say they see everything

i wonder if an astorid explosion would produce an eltromagnatic pulse like a nucular expolosion scrambling electronics?

That scares me. :(

That's what I thought. Now I don't feel quite as 'safe' anymore.:(

So true. It is increasingly accepted that what caused the extinction of dinosaurs 50 million years ago was a huge asteroid that smacked into the Yucatan peninsula.

ill die screaming not dreaming.

see you all in hells passing.

:glugglug

That scares the shit out of me.....

No this is another one.

That other one missed us I think by 8 million miles. Which is still considered very close. It also turned out to be over 500 feet when they thought it was way smaller.

If a 500 ft one hit NYC it'd be bye bye time for all Manhattan.

someone posted this yesterday.

i swear one day a big ass rock is just gonna fall on all of us

this is why i drink......when i go...at least i'm in the right state of mind

We could have sent Whitney and Bobby up in a shuttle. They could easily smoked that rock between the two of them. :thumbsup

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh



but for real, that shit is wild...and I"m sure it's happened more often than we'd like to imagine...and one day it will hit again...I think we can count on it...I think we can also count on our gov not letting us know about it as why create mass panic?

Only in an election year. Cause panic, then say "Don't panic, Mr. President will save us all" and get re-elected.
































I'm SO cynical when I first wake up. A thousand apologies....:glugglug

It's better they don't announce any potential collision...
Any plans you make for spending your last day would only be screwed up by those in mass panic:1orglaugh

Puts life in perspective



i gotta start drinking more!! :1orglaugh

They DID know about it in advance, and it was announced in several reputable science publications. Here's one from the 17th:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...L&type=science

God damn ! And no one saw it comming ???? That's scary ... would still have made a lot of the dammages !

Don't worry, we can always send up 2 space shuttles and blow that fucker in half!

Asteriod are an " IF "
read this shit
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Thats a "when "
, read it yesterday . now THAT is scary .