Although this particular rock poses little threat, maybe our NASA money might be better spent developing a way to locate and take out space rocks and assorted junk that threatens the blue planet.
Back in 1977 we stupidly sent a road map into space telling whomever finds it who, what and where we are. Voyager 1 I believe.
I say if we go to Mars we should launch the CIA out there with a pile of sting ray equipped cell towers to look for aliens. It would keep them busy and maybe, possibly keep us safe.
With my luck they would end up starting war with Uranus and Jupiter.
Seriously, we ought to be able to take out a big rock in space as well as keep an eye peeled for invaders.
The CDC and NIH had people at the epicenter of the Wuhan China pandemic but missed it. Maybe I am asking too much.
An asteroid discovered in 2018 will fly very close to Earth on Nov. 2 according to The Center for Near Earth Objects Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Astronomers spotted the object from Palomar Observatory in San Diego County in 2018 followed by a 13 day observation arc and has not been detected since.
Asteroid 2018VP1 is currently projected to come close to Earth sometime during the day before the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 3, according to NASA.
The asteroid will likely come as close to between 4,700 miles and 260,000 miles of Earth, according to Forbes.
The good news is there is only a 1 in 240 (0.41%) chance of the asteroid entering earth’s atmosphere and because the asteroid is only around 7 feet in diameter, if it does manage to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, it would appear as an extremely bright meteor and break up into tiny pieces.
The logarithmic scale used by astronomers to rate the potential hazard of impact of an asteroid rates 2018VP1 a -3.57
For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science.
Asteroids still only hit Earth on average every million or few million years, even with the increased crash rate. NASA’s list of potential big space rock crashes shows no pending major threats.
The biggest known risk is a 4,200-foot wide asteroid with a 99.988% chance that it will miss Earth when it flies very near here in 861 years.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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