Update - it passed by Earth at 21 times the distance of the Moon at 8.40 am GMT. I.e. about 8 hours ago as of writing this.
No, it's been hugely exaggerated. There's a meteorite with maximum diameter about 300 meters which is due to miss the Earth by 9.35 million kilometers - a miss of 21 times the distance to the Moon, and over 700 times the diameter of the Earth.
How that got turned into an asteroid with massive world-wide effects (i.e. around 10 km diameter) due to hit the Earth I've no idea.
But this is the one they are talking about as they even label it as Asteroid 2012 TT5 in some of the stories. It's also about the fourth such story so far this year - so we've survived three of these "asteroid scares" already this year :).
It is easy to check, as there are tables you can look up with all the current asteroids being investigated, and the probability assessments for each one.
It's also likely that eventually we will get accurate news stories about some smaller asteroid due to hit us, maybe of size of a few tens of meters, as they hit the Earth many times per century with usually no harmful effects. Indeed one such meteorite was actually observed a few hours before hitting Earth already, and they predicted where it would land. But soon we'll get predictions like that much longer in advance, perhaps by the late 2020s as the search gets down to even very small asteroids.
There are far more of those than the huge ones. The really big ones (10 km scale) hit once every 100 million years so only a tiny 1 in a million chance of an accurate. story about one of those any time this century.
While there's a near certainty, once we get down to tracking meteorites that big, of detecting a less than 100 meter one due to hit Earth.
See also:
No, it's been hugely exaggerated. There's a meteorite with maximum diameter about 300 meters which is due to miss the Earth by 9.35 million kilometers - a miss of 21 times the distance to the Moon, and over 700 times the diameter of the Earth.
How that got turned into an asteroid with massive world-wide effects (i.e. around 10 km diameter) due to hit the Earth I've no idea.
But this is the one they are talking about as they even label it as Asteroid 2012 TT5 in some of the stories. It's also about the fourth such story so far this year - so we've survived three of these "asteroid scares" already this year :).
It is easy to check, as there are tables you can look up with all the current asteroids being investigated, and the probability assessments for each one.
It's also likely that eventually we will get accurate news stories about some smaller asteroid due to hit us, maybe of size of a few tens of meters, as they hit the Earth many times per century with usually no harmful effects. Indeed one such meteorite was actually observed a few hours before hitting Earth already, and they predicted where it would land. But soon we'll get predictions like that much longer in advance, perhaps by the late 2020s as the search gets down to even very small asteroids.
There are far more of those than the huge ones. The really big ones (10 km scale) hit once every 100 million years so only a tiny 1 in a million chance of an accurate. story about one of those any time this century.
While there's a near certainty, once we get down to tracking meteorites that big, of detecting a less than 100 meter one due to hit Earth.
As you see really bright fireballs hit the Earth regularly. Eventually we'll be able to predict the brightest of these as we track smaller and smaller asteroids.
So - this is far more probable as the first accurate news paper story about a prediction, just because they are so much more common than the larger ones
- a prediction of a bright fireball, probably over a remote area or the sea as it is rare that they come near populated areas - and maybe causing a small crater, maybe a few remnants hit the surface, maybe it all burns up in the upper atmosphere. And astronomers would probably flock from around the world to view the predicted impact and observe it.
See also:
- How big would a meteorite have to be in order to be a "planet killer"?
- Robert Walker's answer to Is NASA presently capable of fending off a collision if a meteor or any other celestial body were to strike the earth?
- Robert Walker's answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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