A large space rock is headed towards Earth and will come terrifyingly close to our planet this evening, NASA has revealed.
The object is called Asteroid 2018 CB and it’s believed to be between 15 and 40 meters wide, making it larger than the object which caused devesatation when it exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk.
It is one of pair of asteroids which will pass by our planet this week. The first was called 2018 CC and zoomed past at 8:10 p.m on Tuesday. It is thought to be between 15 and 30 metres in size.
‘Although 2018 CB is quite small, it might well be larger than the asteroid that entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, almost exactly five years ago, in 2013,’ said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
‘Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet — maybe only once or twice a year.’ The space agency only caught sight of the pair of asteroids on Sunday – just days before they were due for a close encounter with our planet.
There must be hundreds of these things passing unnoticed through our solar system. I'm not convinced that there are a lot more of them, we just have better detection equipment. Even the Russian meteor was only picked up due to the large number of dashcams that people now use.
Maybe I'm wrong, but if we do get a catastrophic asteroid hitting the earth there isn't a great deal we could do about it so might as well live on and not worry about it :)
Let wait and see, but one thing that is sure is that precaution is far better than sacrifice!!!