{"id":77933,"date":"2018-04-20T01:02:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T08:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/weekend-asteroid-flyby-confirms-were-worrying-about-the-wrong-space-rocks"},"modified":"2018-04-20T01:02:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T08:02:24","slug":"weekend-asteroid-flyby-confirms-were-worrying-about-the-wrong-space-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/weekend-asteroid-flyby-confirms-were-worrying-about-the-wrong-space-rocks","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Asteroid Flyby Confirms We\u2019re Worrying About the Wrong Space Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This asteroid flyby was so close it was about halfway between the Earth and Moon. How\u2019d we miss THAT? #SCINow<\/p>\n

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An asteroid approximately the size of a football field flew close by Earth only a day after it was first spotted this weekend. This near miss is a perfect example of an argument I\u2019ve been making for some time: These<\/em> are the asteroids we should worry about, not the so-called potentially hazardous rocks being tracked by NASA and periodically hyped by panicked headlines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NASA scientists first observed the asteroid, now called 2018 GE3, on April 14, according to a database<\/a>. It ventured as close as halfway the distance between Earth and the Moon, and was estimated to be between 47 meter and 100 meters in diameter (~150 and 330 feet). This is smaller than the asteroids governed by the NASA goal, which is to track 90 percent of near-Earth objects larger than 150 meters (~460 feet) in diameter. Nevertheless, it still could have caused a lot of damage if it had hit Earth.<\/p>\n

If you read tabloids or Google news headlines, you probably hear about \u201cpotentially<\/a> hazardous<\/a> asteroids<\/a>\u201d all the time. But, like we\u2019ve said before, those are not the asteroids<\/a> you need to worry about. Potentially hazardous asteroids are those that NASA has determined could possibly hit the planet in the distant future, generally<\/a> those within 20 lunar distances of Earth and 140 meters in diameter or larger.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This asteroid flyby was so close it was about halfway between the Earth and Moon. How\u2019d we miss THAT? #SCINow An asteroid approximately the size of a football field flew close by Earth only a day after it was first spotted this weekend. This near miss is a perfect example of an argument I\u2019ve been [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroid-comet-impacts","category-existential-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}