Editorial

News flash: World (probably) won't end today

Monday, February 17, 2014

Good news: The world won't end today, probably.

At least it won't end at the hands of EM26, an asteroid the size of three football fields that is whizzing by at about 27,000 mph.

The space rock will fly by about 8.8 times the distance from the earth to the moon, and you can watch it live, starting at 8 p.m. CST from the Slooh Space Camera at http://events.slooh.com/

It's about 885 feet in diameter.

By comparison, the asteroid that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia last year, was only 65 feet in diameter. The explosion damaged thousands of buildings and injured thousands, but no one was killed.

It arrived unexpectedly on the same day astronomers were watching another asteroid make a close pass.

Pieces of the meteorite that struck were to be awarded to gold medalists in seven events at the Sochi Olympics.

That 65-foot-diameter rock released the energy equivalent to about 20 atomic bombs.

"On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908 and Feb. 15, 2013," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement.

"Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us -- fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such as Antarctica. But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all Near-Earth Objects, as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources."

America's rivalry with the Soviet Union pushed us to go to the moon, and we moved on to building the international space station largely, as cynics contended, as a place for the space shuttle to go.

Now, with the private sector taking over commercial space flight, it is a good time for national and internal cooperation in the effort to monitor, and even find a way to deflect, asteroids that pose a threat.

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