asteroids
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Watch Last Week’s Asteroid Fly By Peacefully Instead Of Destroying Us
That little white pixelated bean spinning around above might look more like a bad ’80s video game than the near-messenger of quick and devastating apocalypse, but that’s what happens when you’re taking shots 120,000km away from your subject. What you’re seeing is in fact 2012 DA14 at a resolution of around 4m per pixel over…
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Aussie Observatories Had Front-Row Seats To Asteroid 2012 DA14. Here Are The Videos
27,700km sounds far, far away… but not when you’re talking about a 50m wide, 190,000t asteroid. In this case, it’s 2012 DA14, which made its pass by our tiny area in the Solar System in the early hours of Saturday. It was close enough for a number of telescopes to get a clear view of…
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What Would Happen If The Asteroid Actually Hit Earth Today?
Astronomers are completely confident that the 45m wide asteroid 2012 DA14 is not going to hit us, passing “only” at 28,000km from Earth — the closest encounter with an asteroid ever predicted. It’s a close call, but we will be safe. Even so — what would really happen if their calculations were wrong?
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This Week’s Earth-Buzzing Asteroid Could Be Worth $195 Billion
The idea of mining nearby asteroids for resources we could use on Earth is fast becoming a possibility — and the asteroid set to buzz Earth on February 15 could be worth up to $US195 billion. If we can catch it.