bendedreality.com
| Is Earth About To Be Hit By An Asteroid? Making Sense of Life in a Hostile Universe
This Saturday at roughly 2:38 AM Eastern Time an asteroid bigger than a football stadium will whiz past Earth at 28,000 miles per hour and almost certainly not hit us. But that won't be the end of it. The 755-foot-diameter projectile is set to return every year until 2022, during which time who knows what could happen. Per custom, the asteroid is named after the year it was first discovered: 2010 NY65. Calculations predict it will come within 1.9 million miles of us this time around, a cat's whisker in astronomical terms. The looming object is classified as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" by the Minor Planet Center, based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The center is charged with the weighty responsibility of calculating the orbits of all near-Earth objects (NEOs), so we can always know where they are with respect to us. Not that it really matters. Presently, we know of 875 especially large NEOs circling our world like so many killer