Yesterday, on November 8th 2011, an asteroid 400 m across flew by the Earth at an altitude of 201,700 miles. The tracking of the estimated aircraft carrier sized asteroid was done by the use of a 70 meter Deep Space Network Antenna. many other Deep Space Objects have passed close to earth, but the closest was an asteroid that passed at an altitude of 5480 kilometers though it was only a meter wide. The next estimated object to pass us is in April 13 2029 called Apophis the name of the serpent of death in Egyptian whitch will pass within 5 earth diameters of us. this is a computer generated video of what would happen if an asteroud 500 km in diameter would hit us:
I would like to put out that this video asteroid is 1000x bigger than the topic asteroid, I just would like to point out how lucky we are that this is a very low chance to happen.
I just put up this video because I thought it was cool. :)
Good find on the video and explanation was well said. Like we figured out at the end of class, it might be a good idea to point out that the video is in km and the data on the asteroid is in m. We don't want to get confused that they are approximately the same size. The asteroid in the computer simulation is over 1000 times larger.
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