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Space

Watch an Asteroid Flying By Earth (newsweek.com) 18

Right now an asteroid is zooming past earth "at a relatively close distance" reports Newsweek, "and the event can be viewed live." The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth at around 2:18 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 13, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

The space rock isn't expected to hit Earth. Instead, it will pass by at a distance of about 206,000 miles, which is about 87 percent of the distance between us and the moon.

The event provides a great viewing opportunity. An Italian astronomy organization called the Virtual Telescope Project, which often tracks asteroids and other space objects through the sky, is due to host a livestream of what it calls 2022 ES3's "very close, but safe, encounter with us" on its WebTV page starting at 18:30 UTC on March 13th.

Astronomers don't consider 2022 ES3 to be potentially hazardous, probably due to its size. The asteroid is predicted to be somewhere between 33 and 72 feet in diameter — about as wide as the length of a bowling lane.... [S]cientists track more than 28,000 near-Earth asteroids as they travel through the solar system. Around 900 of these are more than one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, in size.

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Watch an Asteroid Flying By Earth

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  • by HeX314 ( 570571 ) on Sunday March 13, 2022 @02:46PM (#62354155) Homepage
    Posted literally as the event was occurring. For anyone with a time machine, go back about 15 min and watch. Everyone else, you're on your own.
    • And to top it off, that linked site is like a timewarp backwards as well, tons of popups, notifications, and even more popups as you scroll downwards, and filled to the breaking point with ads, with a design that yells 1998.

    • by thsths ( 31372 )

      Actually, 10 minutes late.

      Slashdot, yesterday's news for nerds. Usually wrong, late, misleading, or all of the above. With extra spelling mistakes.

  • The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth

    Will it really come between the moon and the Earth, or will it come closer to the Earth than the moon's orbit? I strongly suspect that this is one of those headlines that is completely misleading. We see these all the time: people look at the headline and then comment as if the headline were true.

    For all Slashdot articles, I recommend going down at least 2 levels: down to the news article referenced in the OP, then down one more level to the original paper, or original report, and skim the abstract/summary.

    • by bjwest ( 14070 )

      The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth

      Will it really come between the moon and the Earth, or will it come closer to the Earth than the moon's orbit?

      Does it really matter if it's between the earth and moon or just closer than the moon's orbit? Either way, it'll be the same distance from the earth, and that's damn close, even for this small of an asteroid.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Well, I'll comment that your comment is okay, but I think you're being too literal on the definition of "between" there. If the wording appears in a headline, then it's definitely clickbait. But exactly on the line between earth and moon? I think the general sense of the word "between" would be more like it should be on the same side of earth as the moon at its closest point, but now I'm wondering if it should be considered in terms of visual angle... If you can get both of them into the same field of view?

      • by Gimric ( 110667 )

        Dude, they were just asking a question. i.e. what do they mean by "comes between the moon and the Earth".

        It's ambiguous, and asking what it actually means shouldn't be flamed.

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          Flame? What flame?

          Since you are apparently not a newbie, you can't be "new around here". Must be some kind of Rip Van Winkle effect? Or hallucinations of flames?

  • > The asteroid is predicted to be somewhere between 33 and 72 feet in diameter â" about as wide as the length of a bowling lane....

    Here you go, Newsweek, in case you need to dumb this down further:

    [S]cientists track more than 28,000 (equivalent to 2,800 bowling pin sets) near-Earth asteroids as they travel through the solar system. Around 900 of these (about the number of bowling balls in 5 tons) are more than one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, (about 328 bowling shoes end-to-end) in size.

  • "You must register to view"

    Sorry, life's too short...

  • That's all very well for you to say. I'll be safely under my bed until the danger has passed.

    Bowling lane? We haven't had one of those in my city in decades. We need measurements in football fields, which we still have, or fly fishing rods.

    • by tgeek ( 941867 )
      Having lived in the Deep South for many years, I find "mobile homes" to be a handy unit of measure - a standard one being 70 feet long. In this case, the asteroid would be about .5 to 1 mobile homes in diameter.

      FYI, I'm not being entirely tongue-in-cheek here - I really do use mobile homes as a unit of measure that is easily understood by almost anybody in the area I lived.
  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    Not the asteroid. All the crap that their web site is trying to get me to download.

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