An asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower hurtled past Earth early Saturday at a speed of 10,400 miles per hour, missing us by 4.6 million miles.
Yet we knew nothing of the space rock, dubbed 2019 OK, until astronomers in Brazil discovered it shortly before the flyby.55-foot-wide asteroid hit the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia
The trail of a falling object is seen above a residential apartment block in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, 2013."We weren’t aware of the Chelyabinsk asteroid" beforehand, says James Bauer, a University of Maryland astronomer affiliated with the International Asteroid Warning Network, which was established by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Chelyabinsk event."It more or less came out from a geometry that was not viewable.
"The impact will blow off material to give [the smaller asteroid] an extra push, just like if you’re standing on a skateboard and you threw a baseball one direction, you’d move in the other direction," Fast says, adding that an asteroid coming our way would need to be deflected by only a tiny amount to keep it from hitting Earth.
Then there's the nuclear option: launching a nuclear warhead into space and detonating it near an oncoming asteroid."It would not be like in the movies where they blow it up ... the blast would be near the asteroid and irradiate the surface," Fast says."The blowoff from the surface is what would nudge the asteroid."
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