A Giant Asteroid Was Spotted Only 24 Hours Before It Passed Earth

Slooh's broadcast said 2017 AG3 was 'roughly the same size as the asteroid that struck Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013,' meaning had it hit, the effects would have been similar.

Business Insider: An asteroid just flew by Earth about 50% closer than the moon, and we barely saw it coming

Early Monday morning, while the US East Coast was making coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-story building slipped past Earth.

The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was discovered only Saturday by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, according to an email from Slooh, a company that broadcasts live views of space.

It's between 50 and 111 feet (15 to 34 meters) long, and when it swung by Earth, 2017 AG3 was moving at 9.9 miles per second (16 kilometers per second). The near-Earth object, or NEO, came within about half the distance that the moon is from Earth, according to Slooh.

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Update #1: Phew! Giant asteroid passed just 120,000 miles from Earth last night - and was only spotted 24 hours earlier (Daily Mail)
Update #2: Another near miss: Is Earth ready for an incoming asteroid? (Charlie Wood, CSM)

CSN Editor: There has been closer calls.

Vesta Is A Baby Planet, Not An Asteroid

Artist's concept shows NASA's Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Vesta A Baby Planet, Not An Asteroid -- ABC News (Australia)

Vesta, the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, has an iron core, a varied surface, layers of rock and possibly a magnetic field - all signs of a planet in the making, not an asteroid.

So concludes an international team of scientists treated to a virtual front row seat at Vesta for the past 10 months, courtesy of NASA's Dawn robotic probe.

They have a bit more ground to cover before Dawn leaves Vesta's cratered, lava-like surface in late August to rendezvous with the king of the asteroid belt, Ceres, another type of proto-planet believed to be flush with water ice.

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My Comment: Looks like a planet to me.

Mining The Asteroids

Sean Connery in 1981's 'Outland,' a British thriller that takes place at a mining colony on a Jupiter moon. Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

A Quixotic Quest to Mine Asteroids -- Wall Street Journal

A new company backed by two Google Inc. GOOG -0.54% billionaires, film director James Cameron and other space exploration proponents is aiming high in the hunt for natural resources—with mining asteroids the possible target.

The venture, called Planetary Resources Inc., revealed little in a press release this week except to say that it would "overlay two critical sectors—space exploration and natural resources—to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP" and "help ensure humanity's prosperity." The company is formally unveiling its plans at an event Tuesday in Seattle.

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My Comment: There is only one problem with this plan on mining the asteroids .... it's how will we get there.

How To Destroy An Incoming Killer Asteroid With A Nuclear Blast

Earth, and the Near-Earth Objects that Threaten It ESA - P.Carril

How it Would Work: Destroying an Incoming Killer Asteroid With a Nuclear Blast -- Popular Science

Simulations show how unleashing Earth's destructive arsenal into deep space could save the planet.

One way or another, it’s on everyone’s minds, living somewhere in the back of our collective consciousness. Hollywood knows it, and continues to plumb it for box office numbers. Sci-fi is rife with it. The fossil record shouts warnings across millennia about it. Even the dinosaurs developed a particular, albeit brief, loathing for it. The killer asteroid--the one that we might never even see coming--could end life on this planet and there would be nothing humans could do about it. It creates a kind of helplessness that’s difficult to even think about, and it’s Robert Weaver’s job to think about it all the time.

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Approaching Asteroid Has A One In 625 Chance Of Hitting Earth

The asteroid has the potential to wipe out millions of lives if it landed on a city Photo: CORBIS

Asteroid Heads Towards Earth With One In 625 Chance Of Hitting Planet -- The Telegraph

An asteroid with a one in 625 chance of striking Earth in 30 years' time has been identified by NASA.

The 460 foot ball of rock named 2011 AG5 is potentially on course to hit this planet on February 5, 2040.

The United Nations Action Team on near-Earth object has begun discussions about how to divert the asteroid, amid fears that the likelihood of a collision could increase over the next few years.

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My Comment: The odds are rather small when you look at it from that perspective.

What If To Do If A Huge Asteroid Was Going To Slam Into Earth?

City Tech student Thinh Lê with the apparatus he built to measure the optical transmission of meteorite samples. (Credit: Michele Forsten)

Asteroid Deflection: What If A Huge Asteroid Was Going To Slam Into Earth? -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2011) — So you think global warming is a big problem? What could happen if a 25-million-ton chunk of rock slammed into Earth? When something similar happened 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs and other forms of life were wiped out.

"A collision with an object of this size traveling at an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 mile per hour would be catastrophic," according to NASA researcher and New York City College of Technology (City Tech) Associate Professor of Physics Gregory L. Matloff. His recommendation? "Either destroy the object or alter its trajectory."

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My Comment: A massive asteroid strike on the earth .... that for sure will make my day.

Outback Asteroid Strike Caused Huge Explosion And Left 80km Shock Zone, Studies Reveal

Satellite image showing an asteroid impact crater at Gosses Bluff in the Northern Territory. Source: Supplied

From The Australian:

EVIDENCE has been found of a massive asteroid impact near the Queensland-South Australia border more than 300 million years ago.

The asteroid, which produced a shock zone at least 80km wide, could be the second-largest asteroid ever found in Australia.

University of Queensland geothermal energy researcher Dr Tongu Uysal discovered the asteroid impact during his studies of the Cooper Basin, which is a large geothermal energy resource being developed on the border between Queensland and South Australia.

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Asteroid Lutetia Has Thick Blanket Of Debris

Photo: About 100km wide, Lutetia is the biggest asteroid yet visited by a spacecraft

From The BBC:

Lutetia, the giant asteroid visited by Europe's Rosetta probe in July, is covered in a thick blanket of dusty debris at least 600m (2,000ft) deep.

Aeons of impacts have pulverised the space rock to produce a shattered surface that in terms of texture is much like Earth's Moon, scientists say.

The finding is one of the first to emerge from the wealth of data gathered by Rosetta during its close flyby.

The details are being discussed this week at a conference in Pasadena, US.

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First Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Discovered by Pan-STARRS Telescope

Photo: Two images of 2010 ST3 (circled in green) taken by PS1 about 15 minutes apart on the night of September 16 show the asteroid moving against the background field of stars and galaxies. Each image is about 100 arc seconds across. (Credit: PS1SC)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2010) — The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope has discovered an asteroid that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October. The object is about 150 feet in diameter and was discovered in images acquired on September 16, when it was about 20 million miles away.

It is the first "potentially hazardous object" (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey and has been given the designation "2010 ST3."

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Earth And Moon 'Bombarded With Large Asteroids 3.9bn Years Ago'

A lunar topographic map of the Moon Photo: NASA

From The Telegraph:

Any life which may have existed on Earth 3.9 billion years ago would have been wiped out in a devastating asteroid strike, new analysis of Moon craters indicates.

Earth and its satellite were bombarded with large asteroids during the solar system’s “turbulent youth”, striking new topographical maps show.

The impacts would have been powerful enough to evaporate any water on our planet and destroy any early organisms.

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Two Asteroids To Pass By Earth Wednesday

Two small asteroids in unrelated orbits will pass within the moon's distance of Earth on Wed. Both should be observable with moderate-sized amateur telescopes.

From Space Daily:

Two asteroids, several meters in diameter and in unrelated orbits, will pass within the moon's distance of Earth on Wednesday, Sept. 8.

Both asteroids should be observable near closest approach to Earth with moderate-sized amateur telescopes. Neither of these objects has a chance of hitting Earth.

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Are Our Asteroid-Destroying Nukes Big Enough?

Asteroids! courtesy of Sandia National Laboratory

From Popular Science:

A new study shows that blasted asteroids could re-form, Terminator-style.

Pop quiz. An asteroid the size of Manhattan is hurtling towards Earth, its impact is sure to result in mass extinction and the destruction of humanity as we know it. What do you do?

The traditional answers would be "blow it up". But new research from Los Alamos National Lab and the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that if the asteroid isn't moving fast enough, or if the nuke isn't big enough, the asteroid will pull itself back together, T-1000-style, within a matter of hours.

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'Terminator' Asteroids Could Re-Form After Nuke

You'll need a big bomb to keep us apart (Image: Adastra/Taxi/Getty)

From New Scientist:

THE regenerating liquid-metal robots in the Terminator movies have a cosmic relation: incoming asteroids that quickly reassemble if blasted by a nuclear bomb.

If a sizeable asteroid is found heading towards Earth, one option is to nuke it. But too small a bomb would cause the fragments to fly apart only slowly, allowing them to clump together under their mutual gravity. Simulations now show this can happen in an alarmingly short time.

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Clues To Antarctica Space Blast

Image: The team's findings could help in the search for other ancient "airbursts" .

From The BBC:

A large space rock may have exploded over Antarctica thousands of years ago, showering a large area with debris, according to new research.

The evidence comes from accumulations of tiny meteoritic particles and a layer of extraterrestrial dust found in Antarctic ice cores.

Details of the work were presented at a major science conference in Texas.

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Dark, Dangerous Asteroids Found Lurking Near Earth

Now you see it: a near-Earth object becomes visible in infrared
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)

From New Scientist:

An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth's orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.

Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.

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Did An Asteroid Strike In Australia Plunge Anglo-Saxon England Into A Mini Ice-Age?

A veil of dust thrown up by an asteroid 2,000ft across may have caused a mini ice-age in 535AD

From The Daily Mail:

A giant meteorite that broke in two as it crashed off Australia, could have been responsible for a mini-ice age that engulfed Britain in 535AD.

The claim was made by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month.

She found evidence of two substantial impact craters in the Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern Australian coast.

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U.S. Scientists Call For The Creation Of An International Asteroid Defense Agency

Asteroid Defense Let's not keep the proposals too long in committee, yeah? NASA/Don Davis

From Popular Science:

Russia's proposal for an Armageddon-style mission to deflect the space rock Apophis seemed bold, but it's not the only one fretting about a catastrophic impact on Earth. The U.S. National Research Council (NRC) released a new report that calls for an international asteroid defense agency that can organize a proper mission to counter possible asteroid threats, New Scientist reports.

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My Comment: If the global warming community can get billions .... why not this agency.

Mystery Object On Course To Whiz Past Earth

The near-Earth object known as 2010 AL30 appears as a spot against the background streaks of stars in this image from the Skylive-Grove Creek Observatory in Australia. E. Guido and G. Sostero / AFAM / CARA

From MSNBC/Discovery News:

It will not hit the planet, but scientists aren't sure what it is, exactly.

A near-Earth object that could be human-made has just been discovered hurtling toward us. On Wednesday, the object called 2010 AL30 will fly by Earth at a distance of just 80,000 miles (130,000 kilometers). That's only one-third of the way from here to the moon — that is, very close.

It will miss us, and if it did hit us, it wouldn't do any damage anyway, but I managed to pick up on some chatter between planetary scientists and found out that the "asteroid," or whatever it is, gives us a new standard: A 10-meter-wide (33-foot-wide) asteroid can be detected two days before it potentially hits Earth. A pretty useful warning, if you ask me.

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Russia Plans to Save Earth From Rogue Asteroid; ‘No Nuclear Explosions,’ Space Chief Promises (Updated)

From The Danger Room:

Vlad Putin, we’re sorry we ever made fun of you. In an interview today with Voice of Russia radio, Russia’s space agency chief said discussions would begin soon over a plan to save the world from a collision with a massive asteroid.

It’s not clear how, exactly, the Russians plan to deflect Apophis, a chunk of rock the size of two and a half soccer fields that was first discovered by astronomers in 2004. Anatoly Perminov, the space agency head, promised that there would be “no nuclear explosions” and that everything would be done “on the basis of the laws of physics.”

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How High Will The Seas Go In A Warmer World?

Remi Benali / Corbis

From Time Magazine:

Even as negotiators scramble to salvage an agreement at the foundering Copenhagen climate talks, a new study in this week's issue of Nature shows that the consequences of inaction on reducing emissions could be more severe than anyone thought.

By looking back about 125,000 years, to a time when global temperatures were as high as they are expected to be by 2100, a team of scientists from Princeton and Harvard universities has calculated that the oceans were probably at least 26 ft. higher than they are now, maybe as much as 31 ft. higher. That's significantly higher than the 13-ft.-to-19-ft. range scientists have been counting on, and it is, write Peter Huybers of Harvard and Peter Clark of Oregon State University in an accompanying commentary in Nature, "a disconcerting message."

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