Asteroid scrapes past Earth just 8,700miles away - with only 15 hours warning | Mail Online »
Posted By merrimarie 3 weeks, 1 day ago in Science & TechnologyYou almost certainly missed it - and luckily it missed you - but an asteroid has come within 8,700 miles of hitting the Earth.
Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the Moon, which is 250,000 miles away.
Even had it been on collision course with us, the 23ft wide asteroid - known as 2009 VA - is unlikely to have made much of an impact because it would probably have all but burnt up in the atmosphere.
It was picked up by the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, then identified by the Minor Planet Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a near Earth object and plotted by experts at Nasa.
It was the third-closest approach on record for any asteroid that has failed to make it through our atmosphere.
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merrimarie
I got interested in politics after 9/11 and that event changed my prospective on government and our country. I support small and conservative/libertarian ...
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