© Marcelo Celo/ Pixabay; inset: Reuters/ Joshua RobertsSix asteroids will greet Joe Biden taking the oath of office.
NASA has identified six asteroids that will blaze past Earth on inauguration day. The space agency labelled the plethora of space rocks as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), meaning they warrant close scrutiny.
"NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighbourhood," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says.
The tightest shave will see an asteroid come significantly closer to Earth than the Moon, the largest passing visitor measuring up to 305 feet (93 meters) in width. In a weird inauguration-day quirk of fate, the Statue of Liberty in New York is also 93 meters tall.
All the asteroids are forecast to safely fly by our planet and continue on their journeys through space. However, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies will still be closely monitoring their progress, due to their "close approach" status. Astronomers have great interest in NEOs because they are largely unchanged from when the solar system was created around 4.6 billion years ago.
Biden will be sworn into office at midday on Wednesday during a ceremony in Washington, DC. Donald Trump's presidency saw the United States greatly renew its interest in space exploration.
Trump threw his weight behind NASA's goal of sending astronauts to Mars, and backed efforts to return to the moon. He also established the Space Force as an independent branch of the military. Biden's plans for America's space program remain largely unknown, and his campaign made little mention of its space priorities.
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Best of the Web: America just experienced a coup, but it wasn't by Trump
In its aggressive reaction to the storming of the Capitol Building on Wednesday, the press, Democrats, and even Republicans have settled on one preferred term: "Attempted coup." They are all...RC
RC
hmm...
compiled this from a couple of places on the web: Neo ... yeah, i know, Near earth orbit ... although, from greek neos for ' new ', add the letter 'r' we get Nero which translated in italian means ' black '.
hmmmmmm.... so we've got a 'new' 'black' 'holy' chunk of stuff, inbound.
what does all this mean ?! fk'd if i kneo. ha.
I had a 120 lb-er Giant Schnauzer. Nero Ruled the street like Caesar
And now it's been normalized to the point where you only find out about such things if you pay close attention?
I do.
My ex-wife was crying on the phone about the US election results, a couple of days ago. She had no hope for the future. I said with all of the corruption and evil deeds coming to a boiling point, the universe may step in. In the form of an asteroid strike. All of that wickedness in one place. Acting like a huge magnet.
It may be things I say to try and create some form of balance. Who knows? Wait and see!
Appreciate the attempts, but DC targeting needs serious improvement.