haxxiy on 15 February 2013
| superchunk said: Those of you who keep saying it has something to do with today's flyby of an asteroid.... that asteroid is still many hours away from Earth. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/02/live-blog-asteroid-2012-da14-has-close-call-with-earth/ It was simply another chunk of space rock. There is a lot of them. |
It was close enough to be disrupted by Earth's tidal forces depending on it's density. For instance, pieces of the Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter over the course of many days, and an asteroid could overcome the distance between that asteroid and Earth in less than one hour.
And I'm not saying it actually has anything to do, in fact I doubt it.... but I also doubt our current capacity of keeping track of everything it goes up there. We kept a close eye on an asteroid of 50 meters and we missed one of 15.
