Earth survived yet another narrow escape from an asteroid discovered just days before it nearly crashed into our planet, and this one was a city-killer. Asteroid 2024 MK is an elongated and angular object five hundred feet long that skimmed past Earth on Saturday June 27th.
This wasn’t the first time Earth barely avoided calamity. Several times each year an undiscovered, or newly discovered asteroid surprises our scientists as it zooms past our planet. Sometimes we don’t see them coming, only discovering the space rock after it just missed hitting Earth. The most famous of these in recent history was the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia on February 15th, 2013. It was a complete, shocking surprise.
One of these times, Earth will win the lottery. With little or no warning, an asteroid will strike our planet, leaving no time to prepare for the destruction.
“An asteroid this size would cause considerable damage,” ESA officials said.
‘So, its discovery just […] before it flies past our planet highlights the ongoing need to improve our ability to detect and monitor potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs),’ the agency noted.
First recorded on June 16th by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa, asteroid 2024 MK’s orbit has now been altered by its incredibly close encounter with Earth’s gravitational pull.
The object zoomed in between the distance between Earth and the moon’s orbit, coming within about 184,000 miles from the surface of our planet’s atmosphere.
Dr Lance Benner, a planetary scientist at JPL who helped lead the tracking of this killer asteroid, said that a true ‘near miss’ like this is not likely again for decades, and that the US space agency worked hard to make the most of it.
Scientists with the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California tracked and imaged the monster space rock via the 230-foot-wide Goldstone Solar System Radar, which also measured the objects’ dimensions.
The JPL scientist says it may be decades before the next near miss, but they do not know when the next undiscovered asteroid will have Earth in its cross hairs.
Earth has no planetary defense against these rogue space rocks that threaten our planet. Like past close approaches, there exist numerous unidentified asteroids of sufficient size to cause substantial destruction.
Will it be one of these “new discoveries” or a complete surprise that slams into Earth and finally awakens the world to understand we do not control the universe but survive at its mercy?
Will such a realization bring humankind together or tear us apart in the chaos of self-preservation? Instead of fighting each other, we must unite to defend our planet. Humans always need an enemy to fear and fight. How about battling to preserve Earth, protecting it from the enemy lurking in the darkness of space?
Source: MSN.com
If you’d like to read a fictional depiction of what could happen if an asteroid storm approaches Earth, ready my novel; ASTEROIDS – Bridge to Nowhere
Learn more about my writing at www.mikemccoy.me