Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 11-10-2017

An asteroid the size of a house will narrowly avoid a collision with Earth, passing harmlessly inside the Moon’s orbit while giving experts a rare chance to rehearse for a real-life strike threat.

Dubbed 2012 TC4, the space rock will on Thursday shave past at an altitude of less than 44,000 kilometres – just above the 36,000km plane at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit the Earth.

That represents about an eighth of the distance between the Earth and the moon.

NASA’s Mike Kelley, who leads the exercise to spot, track and intimately probe the transient visitor, insisted there was “no danger, not even for satellites”.

“We’ve now been observing TC4 for two months, so we have very accurate position information on it, which in turn allows very precise calculations of its orbit,” which will not cross that of Earth nor its satellites.”

The asteroid was first spotted five years ago when it called on Earth at about double Thursday’s projected distance, before disappearing from view.

It is 15 to 30 metres wide – about the size of the meteoroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk in central Russia in 2013 with 30 times the kinetic energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

According to ESA and NASA TC4, the object will make its closest approach to Earth just before 05:41 GMT (07:41 CAT) on Thursday, at a point south of Australia.

Ruediger Jehn of the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object programme in the Netherlands says the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye nor with regular binoculars, “but it can be seen in the night of 11-12 October until about 4.00 am from European observatories.

– AFP 

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