Thursday 4 February 2016

Our Pet Asteroid

Look up to the sky in March and you may just see another flaming ball of matter as well as the Sun because an asteroid is scheduled to fly by but NASA can’t quite tell how far away it will be with estimates ranging from 9 million miles to 11,000 miles, approximately 95% closer than the moon.
Astronomers have only just been able to track its path and they will narrow down the trajectory the closer it gets.
The asteroid, called 2013 TX68, is 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter but astronomers studying the space rock are almost certain that it is not on a collision course with our ball of rock so i am hoping that it is closer to the 11,000 miles than the 9 million.
In 2020 the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) plans to grab an asteroid, tow it along and place it in orbit about the moon so shame we did not have the technology already in place because we could have a asteroid literally fall into our lap save us having to go find one.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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