Near Miss

I hope this doesn't scare anyone. Life is a dangerous business.

In 2013 an asteroid weighing 120.000 tons will pass within 17,000 miles of the Earth -- beneath the orbits of our geosynchronous satellites. You will probably hear a loud Whooosh as it passes overhead.

But not to fear. Scientists have already devised methods of changing the orbital paths of such city-smashing monsters so they will stay away from Earth. They will simply paint one side of the asteroid white (or black, dependiing on the decorator's tastes) so that the light from the Sun will push the behemoth into a new orbit. If that doesn't work, they can shoot kinetic impactors at these space-boulders and bump them out of the way. And if that doesn't work there is always the nuclear solution. They will simply blast the boulder into gravel.

[Kaere]

Interesting - where did you get this info Greybeard?

Today's Al Jazeera, article by Ian O'Neill

[Kaere]

Too bad you don't have a link or something - I don't have easy access to Al Jazeera.

Is Mr O'Neill an astronomer of some kind? I wonder where he's getting his information to write such an article.

Life indeed hangs in a delicate balance! Yet we fight and squabble!

[Morpheus]

However, everything is a known, apart from time, and it also has been prophesied to us, from ages past, within time.

"A near-Earth asteroid – called 2012 DA14 by astronomers – will pass very close to Earth on February 15, 2013. Astronomers estimate that, when it’s closest to us, the asteroid will be about 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) away – much closer than Earth’s moon (about a quarter million miles away) –
and closer even than some of our own orbiting satellites.

Astronomers’ calculations of asteroid orbits can be trusted.
After all, even decades ago, they knew enough about calculating orbits to send people to the moon and bring them safely back, and today we are able place our space vehicles in orbit around objects as small as asteroids.

So, no, 2012 DA14 won’t strike us in 2013. But there is a remote possibility it will strike us in 2020, or later."
http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-2012-da14-will-pass-very-close-to-earth-in-2013

I guess no one can say though whether or not something will break off of it.

Wow creepy... And creepier is even when they blast it to smithereens we still get big (relative to our size of course) chunks of rock... Ouch...

Kaere-- my apologies. I hadn't come back to this thread until today.....

This is not my original source-link, but is about the same asteroid.

http://www.rt.com/news/paint-asteroid-earth-nasa-767/