I just think it's a neat story:
There are video simulations of the fly-by at the link, and also here.
It’s definitely not “Armageddon.” But an asteroid measuring 150 feet in diameter with a mass of 130,000 metric tons will make the closest pass of Earth for an object of its size on February 15, 2013, traveling about 17,450 miles-per-hour (4.8 miles-per-second), NASA noted on Thursday.
The asteroid’s pass will be a “record predicted close approach for a known object of this size,” said Donald Yeomans, manager of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Near-Earth Object Programs Office, in a press conference streamed live on NASA’s website on Thursday.
Yeomans said the asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA14, would come anywhere between within 17,100 miles and 17,200 miles of Earth’s surface, well far away enough to avoid any potential collision with our homeworld.
There are video simulations of the fly-by at the link, and also here.
2 comments:
The Mayas were right! They just miscalculated!
Actually, the Maya, like most other peoples outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition, saw time as cyclical. You'll remember they had nested cycles -- the Year, the Great Year, the Year of Years, etc. The end of the cycle could be rather harrowing, as in Hindu thought, or just a bump. I strongly suspect the "End of the World" scenario is a gross misreading of their whole system, based on the Judaeo-Christian idea of time as linear, with a beginning and an end.
Besides, the Maya were not known for miscalculating.
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