March 11, 2011
During early March, the Earth will be getting ‘a shave’, a close encounter by a planet-killer asteroid that will zip by very near earth’s orbital plane at a speed of 32.9 kilometers per second. That’s 73,595 miles per hour!
Asteroid object ’23187′ also known as ’2000 PN9′ is a monster in terms of size. It is far bigger than most and measures between 1.6 km and 3.6 km across. Folks, that’s a 2 mile wide asteroid! It’s mass and velocity would definitely make it a planet killer if it were to hit the earth. The planet would remain, but we probably would not.
There has been a lot of conspiracy on the Internet about some sort of disaster from space happening on March 15. Looking at all the upcoming close approaches of ‘near earth objects’ in the upcoming weeks from the NASA Close Approaches page, this one, 2000 PN9, is by far the largest and most dangerous.
Looking at the orbital prediction model from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it appears that on March 10, the Earth will be barely a step ahead of the would-be intersection point. The earth will pass through first, followed by the asteroid itself.
The giant asteroid will apparently pass within 45 lunar distances of Earth, a whisker in astronomical terms.
The asteroid was just discovered only 11 years ago, and many new asteroids have been discovered since then.
A statement from the Armagh Observatory, one of the UK and Ireland’s leading scientific research establishments,
“Even conservative estimates would suggest that for every asteroid on a dangerous Earth-Approaching orbit there are hundreds more which have yet to be discovered. There are over 300 known objects on Earth-crossing orbits, the majority of which are potentially capable of causing death and destruction on a scale unheard of in human history.”