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Meet the Giant Asteroid About To Pass Between the Earth and Moon

Meet asteroid "2005 YU55":http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news171.html. At 400 meters in diameter, it's about the size of five Manhattan blocks across and it's heading _almost_ right for us. Tomorrow, 2005 YU55 will hurtle past the Earth at about 30,00...

Meet asteroid 2005 YU55. At 400 meters in diameter, it’s about the size of five Manhattan blocks across and it’s heading almost right for us. Tomorrow, 2005 YU55 will hurtle past the Earth at about 30,000 mph (relative to Earth’s surface), passing by at about .85 the distance from the Earth to the Moon (.85 lunar distances). I promise it won’t make a sharp turn sometime between now and then but, if it did, the asteroid would leave a crater some four miles across and 1,700 feet deep, with a corresponding 7(ish) magnitude earthquake left in its wake.

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The image above comes today via NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, CA.

We tend to misjudge the size of Earth in relation to the solar system and other stuff — like, in thinking the Earth is huge and a sitting duck — so hopefully the gif below will help make sense of the situation.

The last time something this big came this close to Earth was in 1976, and we didn’t even know about it then. The next thing to come close to us will be in 2028, and it won’t be 2005 YU55, which has about a zero-percent chance of hitting us any time in the next 100 years. In fact, we don’t know of anything that has very much of a chance of hitting Earth. Currently, only two near-Earth objects even rate on the Torino impact hazard scale, both of which are ranked one out of 10 in terms of risk to Earth.

You can now return to not worrying about unsecured nuclear weapons, global warming, MSRA, and all of the other many things with some actual chance of mass destruction.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.