Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Not even time to grab ankles

Photobucket

Death on a global scale just missed us:
PASADENA, Calif. – An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

Most people probably didn't notice the cosmic close call. The asteroid was only spotted two days ago and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.


edited: added picture for total impact...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Probably not big enough to wipe us out, but it would have been a pretty major disaster. I'd imagine some big waves if that had impacted the Pacific ocean.

ellroon said...

Not to mention the disappearance of Tahiti ...

It would mean we'd have to redraw all those world maps!