NASA on ALERT: Asteroid Heads for Closest-Ever Predicted Approach to Earth

The flyby of asteroid 2013 TX68 is the closest ever predicted Earth approach for an object this large. The 150 feet (45 meters) rock could pass 11,000 miles (17,000km) from Earth on March 5th which is 21 times closer to our planet than the moon, although NASA admits it might also pass nine million miles away as the asteroid’s orbit is highly uncertain (condition code 7) and the distance of its pass is not precisely known at this time experts say.

However, if the asteroid passes at its closest possible distance of just 11,000 miles (17,000 km), the flyby will be an exceedingly close one and If that were the case, the asteroid would come even closer than orbiting communications satellites.

Asteroid 2013 TX68 has an estimated mass of about 130,000 metric tons. The space rock is traveling at about 32,211 miles per hour (51,839 kilometers per hour), relative to Earth.

According to NASA, if an asteroid of a size similar to that of 2013 TX68 were to impact Earth, it would release approximately 2.5 megatons of energy in the atmosphere and would be expected to cause regional devastation.

A comparison to the impact potential of an asteroid the size of 2013 TX68 could be made to the impact of a near-Earth object that occurred in 1908 in Tuguska, Siberia.

Known in the asteroid community as the "Tunguska Event," this impact of an asteroid just slightly smaller than 2013 TX68 (approximately 100 – 130 feet/30-40 meters across) is believed to have flattened about 825 square miles (2200 square kilometers) of forest in and around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.

The asteroid was discovered by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey on Oct. 6, 2013, as it approached Earth on the nighttime side. After three days of tracking, the asteroid passed into the daytime sky and could no longer be observed. Because it was not tracked for very long,

Although scientists cannot predict its precise orbit around the sun, they say that it cannot impact Earth during its flyby next month.

Furthermore, it seems cosmic rays are rising rapidly and the Earth is tilting North, which is a physical Pole Shift combined with a magnetic polar shift. In the second video BPEarthWatch explains these developments as well as an analysis of Asteroid 2013 TX68 based on the information given by ESA instead of NASA.

 

Astronomers Warn: Giant ‘Centaurs’ May Threaten Earth

The giant comets, termed centaurs, move on unstable orbits crossing the paths of the massive outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planetary gravitational fields can occasionally deflect these objects in towards the Earth.

Centaurs are typically 50 to 100 kilometers across, or larger, and a single such body contains more mass than the entire population of Earth-crossing asteroids found to date. Calculations of the rate at which centaurs enter the inner solar system indicate that one will be deflected onto a path crossing the Earth’s orbit about once every 40,000 to 100,000 years. Whilst in near-Earth space they are expected to disintegrate into dust and larger fragments, flooding the inner solar system with cometary debris and making impacts on our planet inevitable.

Known severe upsets of the terrestrial environment and interruptions in the progress of ancient civilizations, together with our growing knowledge of interplanetary matter in near-Earth space, indicate the arrival of a centaur around 30,000 years ago. This giant comet would have strewn the inner planetary system with debris ranging in size from dust all the way up to lumps several kilometers across.

A decade ago, Stephen Hawking observed that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. This week, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory and the University of Buckingham reported that the discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last two decades means that these objects pose a much greater hazard to life than asteroids.

The team, made up of Professors Bill Napier and Duncan Steel of the University of Buckingham, Professor Mark Bailey of Armagh Observatory, and Dr David Asher, also at Armagh, publish their review of recent research in the December issue of Astronomy & Geophysics (AandG), the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Because they are so distant from the Earth, Centaurs appear as pinpricks of light in even the largest telescopes. Saturn's 200-km moon Phoebe, seems likely to be a Centaur that was captured by that planet's gravity at some time in the past.

 

NASA's New Horizons Spots Mystery Rogue Planet Beyond Pluto

Something strange emerged when Scott S. Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) and his colleague, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, compiled data for the orbits of Sedna, 2012 VP113 and 10 icy objects that lie close to Pluto.

Similarities in the 12 objects' paths around the sun strongly suggest that all 12 are under the spell of a hulking, far-distant planet, Sheppard says.

This planet, if it exists, is up to 10 times as massive as Earth and 200 to 1,000 times as far from the sun. It's so big that it has forced the smaller bodies, which like to keep away from large ones, into unexpected paths.

This super-Earth may have begun its life in the central solar system before becoming a "rogue planet," ejected from its birthplace to exile in the outermost solar system. It may have pulled Sedna and 2012 VP113 along with it from their homes closer to the sun.

From the amount of sky area searched, Trujillo and Sheppard determine that about 900 objects with orbits like Sedna and 2012 VP113 are out there with sizes larger than 1000 km and that the total population of the inner Oort cloud is likely bigger than the Kuiper Belt and main asteroid belt.

Some of these inner Oort cloud objects could rival the size of Mars or Earth. This is because most of the inner Oort cloud objects are so distant that even very large ones would be too faint to detect with current technology", says Sheppard.

And recently, Nasa's New Horizon's probe also captured another mysterious object, a 90-mile (150-kilometer)-wide ancient body, officially called 1994 JR1 passing through the Kuiper Belt 3.3 billion miles from the sun. See first video. The spacecraft is on course for a close flyby of another Kuiper Belt object, 2014 MU69, on Jan. 1, 2019.