Don’t kiss your family goodbye. Don’t sell your worldly possessions. Life on Earth will not be destroyed at 2:24 p.m. today when an asteroid whizzes past just 17,000 miles above the ground.
Though the close approach is a record breaking one for a 150-foot asteroid, 2012 DA14, traveling at eight times the speed of a bullet from a high-powered rifle, has no chance of entering the atmosphere, according to NASA, and very little chance of hitting a satellite. Rather, it serves as a reminder that such impacts have and will occur.
If a similar asteroid did hit Earth, its energy would be equivalent to 2.4 million tons of TNT, said NASA scientist Donald Yeomans in a press teleconference last week.
Such impacts occur every 1,200 years, the last one being the 1908 Tunguska Event, in which an asteroid exploded in the atmosphere above Russian Siberia, creating an air blast that destroyed more than 820 square miles of trees, Yeomans said.
Much smaller objects enter the atmosphere all the time.
Earth accumulates 100 tons of space material every single day, mostly in very small particles, according to Stanley Dermott, a UF astronomy professor, who is regarded by his colleagues as a world expert on near Earth objects.
“In fact, there is one piece of space dust for every square yard of pavement,” he said.
Objects as big as the one that struck the Yucatan peninsula 60 million years ago could destroy life on Earth. They strike every 100 million years on average.
The orbits of asteroids are quite predictable, he said. Bigger threats are from large comets, usually discovered by amateurs, which seemingly appear out of nowhere, potentially on a collision course with Earth with very little warning, Dermott said.
While there are many theories on how to deflect an object big enough to destroy the planet, no such feat has ever been attempted.
