Asteroids – So Many Close Calls July 28

To kick things off, the small-house-sized asteroid 2020 OO1 will buzz by at a distance of  669,000km on July 27.

Then on Tuesday, we will witness a whopping four flybys in one day, starting with the relatively safe and short-lived sojourns of 2020NZ amd 2020 OE2, 28m and 12m in diameter respectively, which will blow through our cosmic backyard at a safe distance of 3.1 million kilometers and 1.7 million kilometers.

Formerly the agency’s oldest active astronaut prior to his retirement in 2018 at age of 61, [Paolo] Nespoli posted a video of asteroid 163348 (2002 NN4), which passed 3.2 million miles by Earth, with a rather ominous caption to mark World Asteroid Day on June 30.

“Between small and big, there are more than one million asteroids out there that could hit the Earth,” he said. “Right now, we are mostly ignoring the probability of a massive one suddenly appearing. It’s time to act: #AsteroidDay.”

Note to readers: Asteroid and meteor impacts are especially likely around June 30, when they appear from the direction of the sun (so we can’t see them coming, as we can at night) during the daytime crossing of Earth’s annual passage through the debris of Comet Encke that also gives us the Taurid meteor showers every year around November 1.

Ancient stories of the Great Flood may have originated with the comet or asteroid that created Burckle Crater.  The impactor is estimated to have been 2-3,000 meters across with an impact equal to approximately one million megatons of TNT.  This is many times more powerful than all of the world’s nuclear weapons combined.  After passing through two miles of seawater in the Indian Ocean a few hundred miles east of Madagascar, the asteroid still made a crater 18 miles wide on the seafloor – roughly 5,000 years ago.

I suggest it may have occurred on November 1, 3102 B.C. – as the world is full of holidays celebrating death at this time of year, and numerous civilizations [archeologically] appear from nothingness around 3100 B.C. along with India’s Kali Yuga Age beginning in 3102 B.C.  (Other scholars suggest different possible dates.)  This impact is undoubtedly the source of “Noah’s” flood (the tsunamis from the impact were up to 670 feet high in Madagascar, and undoubtedly would have pushed ships up the Persian Gulf and Tigris-Euphrates River Valleys…. and may have triggered the last catastrophic pole shift.

Also note the less extreme Tunguska Event of June 30, 1908 – when something entered the atmosphere over Siberia, broke windows almost a thousand miles away, and knocked down an estimated 80 million trees.  Most estimates place the explosion equivalent to between 5 and 30 megatons of TNT, and a 5.0 earthquake that registered on seismic sensors as far away as Washington, D.C.  But that object was only about 65-100 meters across.

I guess if our government was worried they’d be developing some kind of Space Force to prevent anything like Deep Impact…

Let’s hope nothing even that small impacts the Earth again anytime soon.