Another astronomy related post. This time about an asteroid rather than a comet. On Friday 15th February asteroid 2012 DA14 will make a very close flyby (28,000 kms) of the Earth. This is at a similar height to some high orbiting satellites and, therefore, closer than the Moon. This asteroid is not set to actually hit the Earth in 2013, and it won’t when it returns to Earth in 2020. However, if it had been on a collison course with Earth then it could have caused some damage because it’s around 50 metres wide. Although, considering that over half of the Earth is covered by water then any asteroid on a collision course with Earth would be more likely to hit water than any major city.
You should be able to see the asteroid in the night sky on February 15th but it will be quite faint because, unlike comets, it doesn’t produce a coma when flying near to the Sun. It will be low to the north-eastern horizon and moving quite quickly (around 20,000-30,000 kph)!
The asteroid is known as an NEO or a Near-Earth Asteroid and was detected by an observatory in Spain. Unfortunately it won’t be a particularly useful asteroid for my type of science because I would need a sample of it on Earth in order to analyse it in a mass spectrometer to see what elements it contained. However, in the future it may be important for humans to understand how we might be able to deflect asteroids if they happened to be on a collision course with Earth…asteroids have certainly collided with Earth in the past and so are expected to in the future…this isn’t just the stuff of movies!! Hopefully if they send up Bruce Willis to sort it out then they could get him to collect a sample for the cosmochemists…now that bit wasn’t in the movie!