Asteroid to pass close to Earth early Wednesday

[Brent]

The Earth will get its closest known shave this century from a major asteroid, a monster big enough to extinguish billions of lives were it ever to collide with our home.

But, in contrast to the warnings of a handful of doomsayers, scientists say the peril from this rock is beyond negligible.

In fact, they say this particular risk is zero and will remain so for several centuries, thanks to an increasingly successful effort to spot space bruisers and calculate their future orbits around the Sun.

The asteroid in question is 4179 Toutatis, a behemoth some 4.6 kilometres long by 2.4 kilometres (1.5 miles) across.

Spinning like an anarchic dumbbell, Toutatis will be at its closest to Earth at 1337 GMT on Wednesday, when it will be 1,549,719 kilometers (962,951 miles) away, according to the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Programme run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). That may seem comfortingly far. But in galactic terms it is narrower than a whisker: just four times the gap between Earth and the Moon.

Six months ago, panicky rumours spread on the Internet that there was little point to booking next year’s summer holidays — that NASA had got it wrong or lied, and we were all heading for The Big One. Websites run by Christian zealots and individuals in contact with aliens predicted the Second Coming of Jesus or a secret US nuclear missile strike to neutralise the asteroid.

True, Toutatis is so big and will be so close “it should be visible in the night sky in the Southern hemisphere, if you point a pair of binoculars in the region of ëthe starû Alpha Centauri,” says Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University and a fellow of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society.

Were Toutatis to collide with Earth, the energy released would be equivalent to tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs, kicking up dust clouds which would shield out the sunlight, plunging the planet and its inhabitants into a lethal “impact winter.” AFP

[coriolis]

Well, then, I guess I'll do laundry tonight after all.