Eight days ago at 10:11 a.m. GMT, an asteroid the size of a twenty-story building passed very close to our planet. Six days ago astronomers first learned about it. Most people in the U.S. were asleep as it silently zipped by. It happened while you were sleeping.
This asteroid, named belatedly 2023 NT1 was roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters) and it was freakingly close to colliding with Earth at an estimated 53,000 mph or 86,000 km/hr. The closest approach distance to Earth that 2023 NTI achieved was 62,693 miles (100,895 km) according to the European Space Agency.
So why did scientists not catch it soon, especially if it was such a nail-biter. The reason is because the space rock approached our planet from the Sun, and we were not able to see it. This celestrial hat trick has been used before:
In 2013, a roughly 59-foot-long (18 m) asteroid followed a similar path through the sun’s glare and went undetected before exploding in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The explosion released a shock wave that damaged buildings and shattered glass for miles around, ultimately injuring nearly 1,500 people (but killing none.)“
Asteroid falls on earth during dinosaurs extinction day. Illustration credit: Serpeblu (iStock.)
Business Insider magazine says that an asteroid of this size: “with the right composition, speed, and angle of attack . . . might leave a wake of destruction the size of central Paris.” That is, unless it hit the ocean where a tsunami be spawned to cover thousands of miles. However, as asteroids go, 2023 NTI was not even considered to be even potentially hazardous (except for those thousand or so people who might have lost their lives if they lived near near the impact zone.)
Larger asteroids cause greater damage. Current thinking is that the one that hit the Yucatán 66 million years ago was responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs. Such a tremendous collision is sometimes referred to as an extinction-level event. The debris from such a collision throws enough dust into the atmosphere to block much of the Sun’s light and heat for years.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slams into Jupiter. Photo credit: Hubble/NASA
More recently was the collision between Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which in July 1994 slamned into the Planet Jupiter (refer to the five dark spots near the bottom of the photo left.) This collision which was the first to be observed as it occured kept people glued to their seats. Several years later there were still residual effects of the impact visible in the cloud patterns of the Jovian atmosphere over this gas giant.
Altogether scientists have cataloged and are tracking over 30,000 asteroids in our solar system.
And then there is the asteroid mentioned in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 8 which will cause death and destruction to a third of our planet. Don’t be asleep when that one approaches.
