A City Narrowly Missed Been Wiped Out By An Asteroid ~ Scientist

An asteroid that could have destroyed an entire city passed by Earth earlier this week—and scientists didn’t notice until it was just a day away from closely passing Earth.

The rock—named Asteroid 2019 OK—was 187 to 427 feet (or 57 to 130 meters) wide. It wasn’t big enough to cause dinosaur-level extinction, but scientists have referred to it as a “city killer” that could have leveled an entire city.

At its closest, it flew 45,000 miles (73,000 kilometers) from Earth. To put that into perspective, that’s less than one-fifth the distance to the moon, according to The Washington Post.

The asteroid caught scientists by surprise, with astronomy teams in Brazil and the U.S. only detecting the asteroid on Wednesday, just a day before it flew close to Earth.

Professor at Monash University in Australia, noted that just three days before that it passed Earth, Asteroid 2019 OK was 1,000 times fainter, making it harder to spot.

NASA is already detecting larger asteroids than Asteroid 2019 OK. In 2005, Congress directed the space agency to find at least 90% of potentially dangerous asteroids larger than 140 meters by the end of 2020 (Asteroid 2019 OK was only 130 meters wide). But it has only identified about a third of those so far, according to Gizmodo.

Asteroid 2019 has already passed Earth, so it isn’t a threat right now, but others like it could be.

Source: Forbes