Asteroid 2010 GA6 Will Fly By The Earth Today
April 9th, 2010 - 2:36 am ICT by Angela Kaye MasonApr 8 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Okay everyone, get out your trusty telescopes and look towards the skies! And no it isn’t the return of Jesus just yet (hold on my fellow Christians, it won’t be long now!) it is actually just a small little rock, (about 71 feet wide), which is gonna go zooming by the earth tonight at around 7:06 pm.
According to reports from NASA (that’s the big space organization that knows about stuff like this) this rock, properly named an asteroid, will be flying pretty close by, within the moon’s orbit. But don’t go running off to hide under your beds just yet…it will still be over 233,000 miles away! That is about nine tenths of the distance between the Earth and the moon, for those who aren’t so good in math or astronomy. (So maybe the man in the moon should hide under HIS bed!)
Seriously, although this is a newly discovered asteroid, the event is actually nothing new. “Fly bys of near-Earth objects within the moon’s orbit occur every few weeks,” Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office in Pasadena, Ca., said in a statement. This latest asteroids was discovered by the new space telescope at NASA. This Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been in use ever since December and has actually found dozens of new asteroids lately. Although most of the asteroids which have recently been discovered are totally harmless, experts say that could quickly change. As a matter of fact this is not the first potentially dangerous asteroid that has been detected this year! Just in January another rock, the 2010 AL30 asteroid whizzed by within 80,000 miles of Earth, and there have been others.
“NASA is aware of this issue and is trying to find as many of these as they can,” a planetarium astronomer at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, James Wooten, told KHOU.com . “They hope to find them with enough advance notice.” (They HOPE?!? Maybe be should hide under our beds after all!)
But really, the one that is passing by tonight will be about the size of two school buses end to end. Experts say that if one did actually look as if it may come to close to earth, ” “you could perhaps launch something to it that will push it a little bit and change its orbit so it misses Earth.”
- Newly discovered asteroid to pass by earth today - Apr 08, 2010
- House-size asteroid passes close by Earth - Mar 18, 2011
- NASA finds fewer asteroids near earth - Sep 30, 2011
- New asteroid could hit earth in 2040 - Feb 29, 2012
- PS1 telescope discovers a record breaking 19 near-Earth asteroids - Feb 25, 2011
- Research reduces odds of Earth being hit by asteroids by 10-fold - Jul 26, 2010
- Asteroid may yield clues about Earth's formation - Oct 31, 2011
- Two asteroids to pass closely by Earth today - Sep 08, 2010
- Asteroid with potential power of 15 atomic bombs to pass moon's orbit tonight - Apr 15, 2011
- Asteroid to whiz past earth - Mar 18, 2012
- NASA'S NEOWISE finds previously unknown 20 comets, 33,000 asteroids - Feb 02, 2011
- NASA's WISE mission discovers 'horseshoe' asteroid - Apr 09, 2011
- Giant asteroid to pass between earth, moon - Nov 08, 2011
- Asteroids to fly by Earth Wednesday: NASA - Sep 08, 2010
- Asteroids hit earth more frequently than thought - Apr 26, 2012
Tags: advance notice, asteroids, astronomer, distance between the earth and the moon, don yeomans, earth and the moon, earth object, fellow christians, fly bys, houston museum of natural science, infrared survey, man in the moon, museum of natural science, nasa, near earth objects, new space telescope, pasadena ca, planetarium, space organization, wooten