Astronomy » The 140,000-ton rock will pass closer to Earth than TV satellites.
By Sheena McFarland
| The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published 8 hours ago • Updated 1 minute ago
An asteroid about half the size of a football field will pass so near Earth during Friday’s lunch hour that it will be closer than many communication and television satellites.
The hunk of rock that is about 150 feet in diameter with a mass of about 140,000 tons has no chance of hitting the planet, but it’s the closest object of its size to pass by Earth that researchers knew of in advance since they began scanning the skies in the early 1990s. The asteroid, whose name of 2012 DA14 doesn’t quite capture the excitement surrounding it, will be 17,200 miles from the Earth at 12:45 p.m. MST. Communication satellites orbit at about 22,000 miles out, and GPS satellites are about 11,000 miles out.
Seth Jarvis, director of the Clark Planetarium and a NASA Solar System Ambassador to Earth, said he hopes people will look at this asteroid’s flyby as a "teachable moment" to understand the potential danger near-Earth objects pose.
"This asteroid is one of about 1,400 potentially hazardous asteroids being tracked by NASA, and none are at the moment any kind of imminent threat to the Earth, but it’s a matter of when, not if," he said. "Eventually, we have to ask ourselves, if this asteroid is some distance from us, it becomes possible to do something about it. That’s unusual because this would be the first time we would have the choice not to participate in a major natural disaster."
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