At Lunch
@LUNCH - Asteroid to zoom past Earth in March flyby – but how close will it come?─── 12:36 Wed, 10 Feb 2016
Is it time to call Bruce Willis? Asteroid 2013 TX68 is on course to pass by Earth in March but Nasa says we shouldn’t be worried by fears of Armageddon
Bad news: There’s an asteroid heading our way.
Good news: Nasa are confident it won’t crash into planet Earth.
A small asteroid will zoom past Earth on March 5 and come so close we might be able to see it in the sky, according to Nasa.
Asteroid 2013 TX68, which flew past Earth at a comfortable distance of about 1.3 million miles two years ago, is set to return.It could fly as "close" as 11,000 miles to our planet. That would be close enough to be seen with a powerful telescope and a closer distance to Earth than some orbiting communication satellites.
Nasa insists that there is no possibility of an impact and say it could even pass Earth as far out as nine million miles.
“This asteroid’s orbit is quite uncertain, and it will be hard to predict where to look for it,” explained Paul Chodas at Nasa's Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS).
“There is a chance that the asteroid will be picked up by our asteroid search telescopes when it safely flies past us next month, providing us with data to more precisely define its orbit around the sun.”
Nasa scientists have identified an extremely remote chance that this small asteroid could impact on September 28, 2017, with odds of 250-million-to-one.
Flybys in 2046 and 2097 have an even lower probability of impact, they added.
“The possibilities of collision on any of the three future flyby dates are far too small to be of any real concern,” Mr Chodas adds. “I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more.”
Asteroid 2013 TX68 is estimated to be about 100 feet in diameter. The asteroid that exploded in the sky above Russia in 2013 was an estimated 65 feet wide.
In November, asteroid mining was made legal after the passing of a "historic" space bill in the US.
