Huge asteroid to fly by Earth Thursday

By Hum
in Science News & Discussion

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Grand Master

Hum

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Posted

An asteroid the size of a city block is set to fly by Earth Thursday (June 14), and you may be able to watch it happen live.

The near-Earth asteroid 2012 LZ1, which astronomers think is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, will come within 14 lunar distances of Earth Thursday evening. While there's no danger of an impact on this pass, the huge space rock may come close enough to be caught on camera.

That's what the team running the Slooh Space Camera thinks, anyway. The online skywatching service will train a telescope on the Canary Islands on 2012 LZ1 and stream the footage live, beginning at 8:00 p.m. EDT Thursday (0000 GMT Friday).

2012 LZ1 just popped onto astronomers' radar this week. It was discovered on the night of June 10-11 by Rob McNaught and his colleagues, who were peering through the Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

Researchers estimate that the space rock is between 1,000 and 2,300 feet wide (300-700 m). On Thursday evening, it will come within about 3.35 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) of our planet, or roughly 14 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Because of its size and proximity to Earth, 2012 LZ1 qualifies as a potentially hazardous asteroid. Near-Earth asteroids generally have to be at least 500 feet (150 m) wide and come within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet to be classified as potentially hazardous.

You can watch the asteroidexternal-link.png flyby on Slooh's website, at events.slooh.comexternal-link.png.

post-37120-0-18423600-1339681505.jpg

Grand Master

.Neo

Posted
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Well, it's not small, but certainly not huge either in the grand scheme of things.

At the speed it's traveling 500 meters across is enough to wipe out most of the EU f it were to impact. So yeah, it's pretty important to track those things.

Grand Master

Dot Matrix

Posted
Posted

What's up with all these near misses lately? It's like every other week!

Our detection methods are getting better. Really quite something to think about, with all these rocks, how our planet isn't hit more often.

Rising Star

RichardK

Posted
Posted

It would be nice if we had some way to tag these asteroids so we can track them. Something already in orbit, not something it would take weeks/months of prep to launch and hope that there isn't a malfunction or delay.

Mentor

Gaffney

Posted
Posted

The Aorounga Crater was formed when by an asteroid around 500m and created a crater 17km in diameter so anyone within 300 miles would probably die. Would probably also change weather for a year or two for somewhere the size of the USA. So it would kill a few million depending on the location.

If it hit the UK in the middle it the vast majority of it would be gone, maybe Aberdeen and above or London and below would likely survive.

Grand Master

Farstrider

Posted
Posted

It's the speed at which it's traveling that makes it "huge". If that asteroid were to hit the Earth, it would probably wipe out a continent.

Quite correct, an impact like this is estimated to have the nominal impact energy of more than 10,000 megatons

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