No, this is not the moment when we tell you we’re having a “Deep Impact” moment and you should go blow your savings in Vegas while you still have time. This particular new asteroid, 2010 GA6, is going to pass Earth within the orbit of the moon on Thursday, but there is no chance that it will crash into the planet.
GA6 will be making it’s visit at 7:06 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time and will pass us at a range of about 223,000 miles. That’s about 9/10th of the distance from the Earth to the moon. The 71 foot wide chunk of space rock was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in Tuscon, Arizona.
Apparently, close call fly bys like this aren’t even really that uncommon. “Fly bys of near-Earth objects within the moon’s orbit occur every few weeks,” said Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Near-Earth Object Observations program (aka Spaceguard) is responsible for finding potentially dangerous asteroids and determining their orbits to make sure they aren’t going to hit Earth.
The Spaceguard has a new tool at its disposal now – the latest space telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was launched in December 2009. It has been tasked with asteroid hunting – its ability to find and track asteroids that were previously undetectable because they only reflect infrared light is already allowing scientists to discover dozens of unknown asteroids every day. Some of these new discoveries may be hazardous to Earth, but have no fear – Spaceguard is already on the case.
