An asteroid the size of a passenger aircraft has been detected after passing extremely close to Earth.
What’s worrying about that sentence is the word ‘after’. It was completely undetected until three days after it had been at its closest point to our planet.According to EarthSky’s Eddie Irizarry, the asteroid named 2017 OO1 was detected by the ATLAS-MLO telescope in Hawaii on 23 July 2017.
The only problem being that had it been on a collision course for Earth, it would have actually struck us three days earlier on the 20 July.
While it’s important to note that the asteroid did pass at some considerable distance (76,448 miles), that’s still just a third of the distance between Earth and the Moon.
What’s worrying about that sentence is the word ‘after’. It was completely undetected until three days after it had been at its closest point to our planet.According to EarthSky’s Eddie Irizarry, the asteroid named 2017 OO1 was detected by the ATLAS-MLO telescope in Hawaii on 23 July 2017.
The only problem being that had it been on a collision course for Earth, it would have actually struck us three days earlier on the 20 July.
While it’s important to note that the asteroid did pass at some considerable distance (76,448 miles), that’s still just a third of the distance between Earth and the Moon.