Earth Just Narrowly Missed Getting Hit by an Asteroid
The asteroid missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the Moon.
Avery Thompson
On Saturday, astronomers discovered a new asteroid, just a few hours before it almost hit us.
The
asteroid is called 2016 QA2, and it missed the Earth by less than a
quarter of the distance to the moon. That puts it about three times as
far away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it
coming.
So
how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular
asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit. It's
highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging out by
either Mars or Venus, but rarely ends up near Earth.
But another, more worrying reason is that there aren't a lot of people looking for potentially dangerous asteroids. While Congress has tasked NASA with finding 90 percent
of asteroids 450 feet or larger by 2020, the agency is nowhere close to
that goal. Funding for asteroid detection is very low, and most
telescopes that could detect asteroids of this size won't come online
for a few more years.
And
even if NASA was on track to meet that goal, they still would have
missed 2016 QA2, which is only about 50-100 feet. Asteroids of this size
are so small that there's almost nothing we can do to detect them. And
they can still cause a lot of damage. The Chelyabinsk asteroid, which exploded over Russia in 2013, damaged multiple buildings and injured over 1500 people. That asteroid was only about 55 feet wide.
As
far as asteroids go, we've been pretty lucky. But unless we seriously
ramp up our asteroid detection capabilities, it's only a matter of time
before something much worse happens.