Fast flying rocks
I had a silly thought, earlier, seeded by something that came on the news. What if I got hit by a flying rock, on the way home from work? Some time on Monday morning (just after my first coffee from the dispenser out back at work), an asteroid missed us by “that much”. How much? Well, according to estimates, something in the range of 72,000 kilometers. Now that’s a distance I can imagine. Forget the lightyear or the parsec or whatever the synonym for “really really far away” on astronomy sites is this week.
Given that this is the Year of Astronomy, I’m paying closer attention to the chaff generated by the stargazing sector. So, back to the 72,000 km miss. We just returned a vehicle that had 64,000 km on the odometer. We drove something over 6,000 km while on vacation last summer. Key in a few more trips to the mall on weekends and we could have made an equivalent trip.
The lack of roads to the stars isn’t really at issue here, because if the hotdog steering the spacerock had miscalculated, it would have made a hellish mess of our back yard. The estimated size of the asteroid is 50 metres in diameter, which works out to “from here down to the corner”. Tiny (and fast); those who watch for close encounters had a scant two days of advance notice, when the wee tiny rock was spotted, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers. Did I mention “really good eyesight” and “much faster than a speeding bullet”. Time to hire Superman as a crossing guard.
Some things are best not known; I’m not nervous, but there may be others that take issue with close encounters with certain destruction. I saw nothing, because I was probably waiting for my coffee to pour.
