Surprise asteroid nearly hits home

["Allan Edels" <edels@msn.Com>]

This was just posted at CNN:

(see http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/06/20/asteroid.miss/index.html )

Surprise asteroid nearly hits home
June 20, 2002 Posted: 5:39 PM EDT (2139 GMT)
By Richard Stenger
CNN

(CNN) -- An asteroid the size of a football field passed extremely close
to Earth last week but it remained undetected until days later,
astronomers said Thursday. 

The space rock missed our planet Friday by only 75,000 miles (120,000
km), about one-third the distance to the moon, making the near collision
one of the closest ever recorded. 

Cruising at 6.2 miles (10 km) per second, the big boulder could have
unleashed some major firepower had it struck, according to the NEO (Near
Earth Objects) Information Center in Leicester, England. 

The destructive force might have been comparable to an asteroid or comet
that exploded over Siberia in 1908, which flattened 77 square miles
(2,000 square km) of trees, according to the NEO. 

But the asteroid, designated 2002 MN, is not in the same league as
potential killer rocks measuring more than 0.6 miles (1 km) in diameter,
some of which are known to lurk in our space neighborhood between Mars
and Venus. 

"2002 MN is a lightweight among asteroids and incapable of causing
damage on a global scale, such as the object associated with the
extinction of the dinosaurs," the NEO center said in a statement. 

2002 MN was first spotted on June 17 by scientists with the Lincoln Near
Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project in Socorro, New Mexico. 

The closest near miss in recent decades took place in 1994, when
asteroid 1994XL1 passed within 65,000 miles (105,000 km) of our planet.

Allan Edels