Asteroid 2012 BX34 was discovered Wednesday. It passed between the Earth and the moon hours later. Still think those "killer" asteroid doomsday scenarios are unnecessarily alarmist?
The asteroid was determined to be about the size of a school bus, and a good thing. Considering that 2012 BX34 was discovered on Wednesday, according to a report from BBC News, it is a very good thing. That, and the fact that because of its size, it posed no true threat to the Earth.
"It's one of the closest approaches recorded," Gareth Williams, associate director of the US-based Minor Planet Center, told BBC News.
"It makes it in to the top 20 closest approaches," he said, "but it's sufficiently far away... that there's absolutely no chance of it hitting us."
2012 BX34 passed within 37,300 miles (60,000 kilometers) of the Earth, about one-fifth the distance to the moon. It is the closest near-miss since 2011 MD, a space rock that was also described as being the size of a large bus, passed by the Earth in November. It missed the planet by 7,600 miles.
A smaller asteroid had passed by earlier in 2011, coming as close as 3,400 miles.
But those were the small ones. Asteroid 2005 YU55, which was the size of an aircraft carrier and classified as a "potentially hazardous object," swung past the Earth in November, some 202,000 miles out. The moon orbits at 239,000 miles.
Although 2005 YU55 was the biggest Near Earth Object (NEO) to pass by the Earth in 35 years, this near-missing happens all the time...
The NEOWISE Project announced in September that it had completed its designated mission of mapping near Earth objects. The study concluded that the WISE -- the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer -- had identified roughly 19,500 medium-size near Earth asteroids (at a size large enough to destroy a city) in the Solar System. That was the good news. The bad news was that they believed they had only identified 90 percent of the total number of "killer" asteroids flying about our stellar neighborhood.
There are 911 "killer" asteroids that have been identified that are larger and massive enough to cause a catastrophic event such as that produced by the Chicxulub meteorite. That particular "killer" is estimated to have been about 110 miles in diameter. It is believed to have caused the devastation and die-offs of the dinosaurs and countless other species that occurred about 65 million years ago.
The NEOWISE Project estimated that there are approximately 80 more of these enormous asteroids hurtling through the Solar System, unidentified and uncharted.
And before Wednesday 2012 BX34 was an unknown space rock as well. Still, that small space rock would have been incinerated upon entering the Earth's atmosphere.
One the size befitting a doomsday scenario would most likely be discovered long before it approached the Earth.
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