An Asteroid Nearly Missed The Earth On March 2Nd 2009 - Wow That Was A Close Encounter, More To Come?

Asteroid DD45 barely missed earth on March 2nd 2009.

If asteroid DD45 has hit the earth, it could have wiped out a whole medium sized city.

The earth got a visit from DD45 on March 2nd 2009 when it passed the earth at a distance of approximately 75000 kilometers away from us.

This is much closer than the distance to the moon from earth, and only around twice the distance the geostationary satellites have from earth.

So it was a pretty close encounter with an asteroid, and its travel through the space can be watched at Spaceweather.com web site and at NASA web site as well.

The size of the asteroid DD45 is around 30-40 meters in diameter, so it's a small sized object, however it could have created major damage with major local impact upon a hit with the earth, if it had hit urban areas. There would not be a global disaster if DD45 had hit the earth, as it is too small for this. DD45 is comparable to the asteroid which hit the earth in the morning of June 30th 1908 in Tunguska area in Siberia in Russia.

It is pretty common that asteroids comes close to earth, but rarely they hit earth and the chances are marginal that an impact will happen in populated areas of the earth.

Majority of earth surface is not populated and most of its surface is water, so there is a bigger chance it will hit either of these areas versus a populated area.

When the Tunguska asteroid hit the atmosphere with 54000 kilometer pr hour, it heated up the air around it to around 24700 degrees centigrade. The combination of pressure and heat lead to an explosion equivalent to around 180 Hiroshima nuclear bombs according to NASA. 80 million trees were blown over in an area of around 2150 square kilometers, and the impact would have wiped out a large city with no problem.

DD45 was hard to see and it was only reported 4 days before it passed earth (February 28th 2009). This is due to its small size, as we expect larger objects to bee seen in good time before they close onto earth.  Most asteroid belts outside the planet Mars is mapped out, and in the year of 2036 a much larger asteroid than DD45 will pass the earth within a distance that will require the attention of experts.

The asteroid is called Apophis, and was discovered some years ago. In the year of 2029, it will pass the earth at a distance were it can hit communication satellites orbiting the earth, while in the year of 2036 it will come even closer that that. The Apophis is around 600 meters in diameter, and will be at the closest range to earth on Friday the 13th 2036. For some people, this has been calculated as the end of the world date. However there is a chance of 1 to 45000 that Apophis will hit the earth according to NASA calculations. However, if the asteroid hits the earth, it will have regional and maybe global effects which can be serious.

The earth has been hit by so called continent breaker before and will be hit again, that is for sure. The ability for experts to detect these objects in space has been enhanced and improves by each year.  Whether we are going to be hit in 100 or 1000 years time, is not possible to tell, but we need to prepare as good as we can. Several projects around the globe is occupied with this fact and tries to give us estimates and prognosis's that will give us time enough to prepare for any potential objects hitting the earth in the future.

Preliminary calculations estimate around 1.9 million asteroids with a diameter of more than 1 kilometer in our solar system alone. The largest detected so far is called Ceres and is estimated to 950 kilometer in diameter. Ceres is at the moment classified as a dwarf planet. More will be know about Ceres when the Dawn spacecraft visits the dwarf planet in 2015. It will explore asteroid 4 Vesta in 2011 before arriving at Ceres.