Monday, June 27, 2011

Earth Almost Catches a Bus - sized asteriod that is...

Tim Sayell sends in an article concerning a very close call on June 27th of this year. A bus sized asteroid flew so close to the Earth that it was well inside many of satellites orbits.

Asteroid 2011 MD, passed within 7500 miles at 1pm passing over the coast of Antarctica before being slingshot back into deep space.

Asteroid 2011 MD was only discovered last week (June 22nd 2011) by Astronomers with the LINEAR near-Earth object survey in Socorro, N.M. The asteroid was in fact pretty small by comparison at the most only 66 feet long and is a Apollo object which means that they objects that cross Earth's orbit and have fairly short duration orbits among others.

Click here for the complete Yahoo News article







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