Two-Mile Wide Asteroid has ‘Near Miss’ With Earth This Morning

While you were tucked up in bed this morning a two-mile wide asteroid had a “near miss” with Earth – 15 million miles away.

Nasa’s ship called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, will be responsible for hitting Didymoon, while the European vehicle will map its change in orbit around Didymos, and will monitor the material that is ejected from the rock’s surface following impact.

NASA uses its highly automated collision monitoring system Sentry to continually scan the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years.

The space agency has been tracking the giant rock and has given the all-clear that it won’t collide with our planet.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which in 2012 announced a partnership for a mission to study potential deflection of an asteroid, released the details of their plan at a recent meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress.

Asteroid 86666 (2000 FL10) was first spotted 15 years ago on March 30, 2000 by the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, USA. “It poses zero threat”.

Online conspiracy theorists claimed one would crash into Puerto Rico in September, causing widespread devastation to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, Mexico and Southern America.

Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object office said at the time in August there was “no scientific basis or shred of evidence” to confirm those rumours. Didymoon is only 160 meters in diameter (525 feet), so it’s not a large asteroid by any means-certainly not as large as the one from Armagaddeon, which required Bruce Willis fly a nuclear bomb into it. But the two space probes should still provide a few invaluable information.

The asteroids orbit crosses the Earth’s orbit similar to that of 1862 Apollo that was classified a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

He added that there would be no Earth impacts “anytime in the foreseeable future” and all known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a “0.01 per cent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.”