© Slooh Space CameraThe 460-foot (140-meter) asteroid 2013 ET is seen through a Slooh Space Camera telescope in the Canary Islands on March 9, 2013, during its close approach to Earth. The asteroid was just within 600,000 miles of Earth, about 2.5 times the Earth-moon distance.
In the last seven days, an asteroid the size of a city block and three smaller space rocks have zoomed safely by Earth, the latest demonstration that we live in a solar system that some scientists have dubbed a "cosmic shooting gallery."
All four asteroid flybys occurred between March 4 and today (March 10). The asteroids were also all discovered this month, some just days ago.
The biggest space rock encounter occurred Saturday (March 9), when the
asteroid 2013 ET passed just inside 600,000 miles (965,606 kilometers) of Earth. That asteroid is about 460 feet (140 meters) long and approached within 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the moon.
"The scary part about this one, of course, is that it's something we didn't even know about," said Patrick Paolucci, president of the online Slooh Space Camera during a live webcast of 2013 ET's flyby. The asteroid was first discovered on March 3 by the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona. [
See a video of asteroid 2013 ET]
Also on Saturday, a smaller asteroid called 2013 EC20 (discovered on Thursday, March 7) came even closer to Earth, passing at a range of about 93,000 miles (150,000 km), less than half the distance to the moon. It was about 23 feet (7 m) across.
Had asteroid 2013 ET actually hit the Earth, instead of zipping safely by, it could have destroyed a large city,
Slooh Space Camera engineer Paul Cox said in the webcast. Cox controlled the remotely operated Slooh telescope in the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa, as the asteroid zoomed by Earth at a speed of 26,000 mph (41,842 km/h).
Comment: It's interesting that they don't even entertain the possibility that a space rock might have collided with the Russian satellite, especially since they state that "the predicted distance would seem to preclude a collision". Given that fireballs are currently raining down on our planet and given that the International Space Station was hit by a small space rock last year, shouldn't cometary debris at least be on their radar of possible explanations for what happened to these satellites?