On January 29, 2008, we’re told that an asteroid 1/4 mile wide will pass .0038 AU’s - that’s 353,232 miles - from Earth. The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,855 miles, so this is about 1.4 times that distance.

The asteroid is named 2007_TU24 (TU, as in “Time’s Up” ). Anyway, I’m glad we’re not anticipating an impact event. Here are some other close approaches we can look forward to. (Search the page for 2008).

Here’s a time progression, using NASA’s little Java utility.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.