http://www.foxnews.com/science/2017/01/25/newfound-asteroid-rerun-zips-harmlessly-by-earth.html
A newfound asteroid about the size of a bus zipped safely by Earth
late Tuesday, just days after its discovery.
The asteroid 2017 BX buzzed by Earth at a range of 162,252 miles,
about 30 percent closer than the distance between the Earth and
the moon, at 11:54 p.m. EST, according to online Slooh observatory,
which tracked the object late Tuesday in a live webcast at Slooh.com .
The asteroid was first discovered Friday. You can see an animation
of the asteroid's orbit here.
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The asteroid's relatively dim brightness and its speed, a
whopping 17,000 mph, made it difficult for Slooh telescopes
to spot.
. . . . . .
Slooh only has a half-meter telescope. I think you can buy
bigger ones online. This is pretty shameful for a facility
that's trying to give us a heads up about the sky falling.
Maybe a crowdfunding effort ... ?
There was another, slighly larger, rock that came REALLY
close just a week or so ago - and again was only noticed
at the last minute.
This is a PROBLEM. Falling asteroids in this size range
can produce multi-kiloton blasts. The last one in Russia
was calculated to produce a half-megaton explosion.
If things are "tense" in the world - like Obama had made
things with Russia - or somebody just has a twitchy
trigger-finger very BAD things can result from large
surprise explosions. The first assumption is gonna
be "Nuke !".
What if the thing had fallen on N.Korea or near one of
those military island China had built ? What if it had
fallen in eastern Poland ? Jerusalem ?
Oddly, the #1 proponent of a good global asteroid
detection and intervention program has been
Vladimir Putin ... but few others seem enthused.
Sorry, but it HAS to be done, even IF it was Putins
idea. Wouldn't be terribly expensive ... a small
donation from the ten or twenty richest countries ...
and the US and Russia and maybe China could
just dedicate an ICBM or two for interception
purposes if that was the advisable course. For
smallish (under 50 meters) visitors you might
not even need a warhead - just crash into the
thing at high speed and spread its energy over
a wider area ... the bits might never reach the
ground at all.
We need 360-degree surveillance of our planetary
neighborhood ... and maybe some good AI software
dedicated to spotting even small rocks so we won't
have to hire hundreds of mostly-bored humans.
The first heads-up about something headed towards
a global hot-spot and it'll all be worth it.
Oh yea :
http://www.obsessiontelescopes.com ... half-meter+
http://planewave.com ... ditto $37k