Asteroid Near Miss

While the national media is focused on the Republican Florida Primary next Tuesday, a small asteroid will be whipping past Earth at a distance roughly 100,000 miles farther away than the Moon's orbit. It will be easily visible in a backyand telescope or good binoculars. The asteroid poses no danger, but in cosmic terms, that distance is a near miss.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was discovered by astronomers only last October. That's due largely to its size, which is anywhere from 500 to 2,000 feet across. The close approach will give astronomers the opportunity to nail down its size and determine much else about the body.

A clever journalist, or political candidate, could put this event with the near miss of Mars by another small asteroid reported in this blog recently, the near miss of Earth by another asteroid the same day of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Shoemaker Levy crashing into Jupiter in 1994, the 1906 Tunguska Event, and our evolving understanding of the threat to Earth posed by collisions with comets or asteroids to bring up the subhect of developing a space capability that would allow us to deflect such bodies. Not trying to develop such a capacity is simple gambling, with everything-- literally everything human-- on the line.