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Asteroid Near-Misses (AKA: Holy Shit! We're All Going to Die)

They're coming thick and fast.
I do wish that the people (I assume it's people) that write these articles would do a 'sense check' of what they've written before hitting 'send'.
Because a sentence in this makes no sense at all.
"...is set to make it's closest approach today at a distance of 4.6 million kilometres per hour".
Idiots.
Anyways, in case you wondering, it has been measured using the Standard System - 'the size of a house'.
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tec...ay-come-dangerously-close-71679978665234.html
 
Bit late to spot it though even if it turned out to harmless,

In the wee morning hours on Sunday (Jan. 21), a tiny asteroid came hurtling through the sky and smashed into Earth's atmosphere near Berlin, producing a bright but harmless fireball visible for miles around.

Such sightings typically occur a few times a year — but this one was unique because it was first detected by scientists roughly three hours before impact — only the eighth time that researchers have spotted one of these space rocks before it hit.

The asteroid, dubbed 2024 BXI, was first discovered by self-proclaimed asteroid hunter Krisztián Sárneczky, an astronomer at the Piszkéstető Mountain Station, part of Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. He identified the cosmic rock using the 60-cm Schmidt telescope at the observatory. Shortly after the space rock's discovery, NASA gave a detailed prediction of where and when the meteor would strike.

"Heads Up: A tiny asteroid will disintegrate as a harmless fireball west of Berlin near Nennhausen shortly at 1:32am CET. Overseers will see it if it's clear!" NASA tweeted on the night of Jan. 20.

https://www.livescience.com/space/a...asteroid-hours-before-it-exploded-over-berlin
 
madmath said:
I thought giraffes were the current standard for meteors.
Click to expand...
I'm quite versatile and can handle Big Bens, Eiffel Towers and Empire State Buildings, but I can't deal with all these new-fangled units of measurement.
 
Empire State Building sized.

A huge "potentially hazardous asteroid" about as wide as the Empire State Building's height is due to zoom past the Earth on Friday.

This asteroid, named 2008 OS7, is estimated to be between 690 and 1,570 feet across, according to data from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The Eiffel Tower is about 980 feet, while the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall.

This asteroid will pass by the Earth at a distance of around 0.01908 astronomical units, or about 1.77 million miles. For reference, the moon orbits at a distance of 240,000 miles, while our planetary neighbor Venus is 38 million miles away at its closest point.

The asteroid 2008 OS7 will make its closest flyby in the afternoon of February 2 and will pass Earth at a speed of about 18.2 km/s, or 40,700 mph. A speeding bullet, in comparison, can travel at between 600 and 2,000 mph.

Asteroids are chunks of rock left over from the formation of the solar system, most of which are found in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Most of these asteroids are fairly small, but some are enormous: the largest is named Ceres and is about 600 miles across. Occasionally, Jupiter's gravity or collisions will fling one of these asteroids into the inner solar system, sending them careening past Earth.

https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-asteroid-empire-state-building-size-flyby-1865684
 
Nobody talks about things being as wide as the Empire State Building’s height. If you turned the camera around 90 degrees, it would be as tall as the Empire State building, surely?
 
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