Near Miss As Asteroid Passes Earth

Topper

Monday July 3, 06:56 AM
Earth has had a close encounter with an asteroid. The rock, half a mile wide, was almost as close to the Earth as the Moon as it passed by, making it a near miss in astronomical terms. However, scientists who had been tracking the path of asteroid 2004 XP14 were not worried.
They knew that the space rock, travelling at 17 kilometres per second, would not hit the Earth.
The object, discovered in December 2004, is one of a class of "Apollo" asteroids whose orbits cross that of the Earth.
Initially there were concerns that the asteroid might collide with the Earth later this century.
However, further analysis of its orbit has ruled this out - at least for the foreseeable future.
If XP14 did hit the Earth the effects would be devastating.
"It would probably be big enough to wipe out a small country," said Dr David Asher, from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland.
He added: "At least we knew about this asteroid. We should be more worried about the unknown ones. There are quite a lot of them flying around out there that are still to be discovered."
Scientists hope to gather valuable information about the asteroid by bouncing radar signals off it.
It was not possible to see the asteroid with the naked eye

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Formerly toppervte33h
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BGonaSTICK

Thought this was interesting, and actually pretty funny...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm

You need to configure your BBC player options to hear it.

If that link doesn't take you to the clip, try:

http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/sear...teroid&uri=%2F

and click on the asteroid picture top right.

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