A Giant Asteroid's Close Fly By of Earth Will Be Streamed Live Tonight

[Rhykker]

A Giant Asteroid's Close Fly By of Earth Will Be Streamed Live Tonight

A giant asteroid will miss the Earth tonight by two million miles, and the fly-by will be caught on live stream.

An asteroid the size of three football fields will zip by the Earth tonight at 27,000 mph, and the fly-by will be live-streamed for your viewing pleasure.

Dubbed 2000 EM26, the asteroid is roughly 885 feet in diameter and will miss our planet by two million miles - or about 8.8 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Space.com [http://events.slooh.com/] will stream the event live tonight starting at 9 p.m. ET.

2000 EM26 was discovered on March 5, 2000 and is classified as a "potentially hazardous object" - in other words, its orbit has the potential to make close approaches to the Earth, and the asteroid is large enough to cause significant regional damage if an impact occurs. A member of the Aten family of asteroids, 2000 EM26 is not the first Aten asteroid to get media attention; in 2004, it was believed that 99942 Apophis would hit our planet in 2029, but further observations have eliminated this possibility.

Available to the public since 2004, Slooh is the first robotic telescope service that allows for live viewing through your browser.

Source: USA Today [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/17/asteroid-2000-em26-near-earth-fly-by-february-17/5554945/]


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[CriticalMiss]

Personally I wouldn't call it 'close', to be close it would have to be closer than the Moon is to us but not so close that the kid from Free Willy can have a slow motion shot with it. It's also rather incosiderate of the asteroid to pass by at 2 in the morning

Hopefully there won't be a repeat of the Chelyabinsk thing though.

 

[Vivi22]

Personally I wouldn't call it 'close', to be close it would have to be closer than the Moon is to us but not so close that the kid from Free Willy can have a slow motion shot with it. It's also rather incosiderate of the asteroid to pass by at 2 in the morning

Hopefully there won't be a repeat of the Chelyabinsk thing though.

In astronomical terms that distance is extremely close. Something being predicted to come closer than the distance between us and the moon is when I'd start worrying a bit.

 

[CriticalMiss]

Personally I wouldn't call it 'close', to be close it would have to be closer than the Moon is to us but not so close that the kid from Free Willy can have a slow motion shot with it. It's also rather incosiderate of the asteroid to pass by at 2 in the morning

Hopefully there won't be a repeat of the Chelyabinsk thing though.

In astronomical terms that distance is extremely close. Something being predicted to come closer than the distance between us and the moon is when I'd start worrying a bit.

I know, that's why I qualified it with 'personally'. In terms of the size of the Universe pretty much the entire galaxy is 'close'.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

We're going to get to watch Bruce Willis blow it up while Steve Buscemi rides a nuke like Slim Pickens at the end of the video, right? Right? I'm mean this is a rare occurrence, but nothing spectacular is going to happen in the stream unless some scientist are explaining hypothetical situations involving the rock if it did come closer. It's not something like an eclipse where you can see in real time what is happening.

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