"Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s," says Don Yeomans of NASA's Near Earth Object Program says, "we've never seen an object this big get so close to Earth." That's about 5% of the average distance between the Earth and the Moon. (See also: The Last Policeman: solving a murder before an asteroid wipes out life on Earth.)

  • duncancreamer

    Didn’t something like this just happen – came within the orbit of the moon or somesuch?

    • BigBloxB

       That’s what I thought, too. I think that one was even larger.

    • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

      We get very close ones pretty often, but this one is far larger than most, and very much closer. It’s not just within the orbit of the moon, it’s less than 1/10th the distance.

      Here’s a list of recent near misses:

      http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

      Here’s a great site for keeping up with asteroids, aurora, solar flares, etc:

      http://spaceweather.com/

      And here’s a nice way to check your local observing conditions:

      http://cleardarksky.com/csk/index.html#chart_list

      (you set your location, then can patch the code in to a web page or bookmark your local link – for instance, here’s Cincinnati: http://cleardarksky.com/c/CincinnatiOHkey.html )

  • semiotix

    Ha! Nice try, God/nature/universe/asteroid. 

    On behalf of humanity and its assorted subaltern biomes, I’d just like to say that this confirms once again that we’re invincible, and that nothing can possibly go wrong now.

    • PhosPhorious

       It’s perfectly safe to let our guard down. . .  even for a second!

  • http://twitter.com/felixturner Felix Turner

    A 50m asteroid would vaporize in the atmosphere (e.g. Tunguska Event) so no biggie.

    • GlyphGryph

       At 50m, doesn’t it depend on the material it’s made of? (Don’t know if that was mentioned in the article)

      The asteroid calculator indicates that under fairly normal conditions, a metal-asteroid of this size could easily create a mile-wide crater. A pretty localized disaster but still pretty bad.

    • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

      The meteor crater in Arizona was caused by an iron meteorite around 50 meters in diameter, and was equivalent to a 10 megaton nuke.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meteorcrater.jpg

    • Finnagain

       Tell that to the Tunguskans.

    • http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

      Tunguska Event was a biggie.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Lieberman/16302352 Michael Lieberman

      Wasn’t Tunguska most likely a comet?

      • Finnagain

         All I know is the Cigarette Smoking Man was involved somehow.

    • Gerald Mander

      Your “no biggie” Tunguska event flattened trees for 830 square miles and would have registered 5.0 on the Richter scale. From Wikipedia:  “An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.”

      • Antinous / Moderator

        I don’t even wake up for a 5 anymore.

        • jackbird

          Especially not if it’s an airburst.  You don’t get the chance.

    • http://twitter.com/its_MAcki Marcin Mackiewicz

      Tunguska event was Nikola Tesla experiment on weapon of mass destruction. This si my opinion proven by many documents :] Believe in what you want.

  • SamSam

    The link for the quote should probably be http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/28jan_2012da/, not nymag. The post at nymag has even less content than this post.

  • shutz

    Just one day late for a Valentine’s Day kiss…

    …of DEATH!

  • http://www.creaturesoflight.com dagfooyo

    I wonder if an appropriately-sized asteroid collision, say into a mostly empty place such as the Sahara or Siberia, could be engineered such as to do minimal harm to humans or wildlife but still kick up enough dust to temporarily counteract some of the effects of global warming by cooling the planet down for a few years.  In essence it could be a mini nuclear winter without all that nasty radiation.  Give the ice caps a chance to grow back, etc.

    • AnthonyC

      Maybe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering 

  • planettom

    it’s not going to hit, but that it’s coming closer than geosynchronous satellites is what makes it interesting.   

    Apophis will do the same in 2029 (Apophis is a lot bigger though, 270 meters to this asteroid’s 50 meters or so).

    I note that at least one observatory on east coast U.S.A. is having observing from 8pm-10pm ET on Feb. 15th of 2012 DA14 (Rolnick Observatory in Connecticut’s Facebook page).

  • http://www.zachstronaut.com/ zachstronaut

    Feb 15 is Galileo Galilei’s birthday.