Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Holy crap!

- We almost got hit by a killer asteroid Monday morning. How come no one's talking about this?

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.
That Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908 always sort of fascinated me, I guess because when I was a kid there was a crackpot theory floating around that it was caused by a UFO crashing into the Earth and I always thought that was creepy/interesting. I think the general scientific consensus now is that it was an asteroid or comet. Anyway, it's kind of sobering to think that 2009 DD45 could have easily wiped out a major American city and it wasn't even spotted until like 2 days before the near-miss. Freaky.

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