That headline reads likes a classic Weekly World News front-pager, doesn’t it?
Except that it’s very real. It happened last week and we’re not quite sure if doomsday preppers from all over were peeing in their pants from sheer happiness that it almost did come, or in mortal fear that the universe was actually not bluffing—maybe they thought, ‘hey, we’re just preparing for it. Di ba pwedeng prepare lang?!
What happened was that NASA on Thursday got caught making tulog in the pancitan when it whizzed past us at a distance of 70,000 km—way nearer than where the moon is at 384,000 km from earth. If it had hit us it would have released energy the equivalent of 30 Hiroshima atom bombs, say startled scientists.
Do you want to know what the name of the asteroid is?
Asteroid 2019 OK.
Very funny.
We are not making this up.
When we got wind of the news we dropped a message to our resident astrophysicist—yes, we have one like others have meteorologists, so we can check the weather on other planets—Dr. Rogel Mari Sese to get the lowdown on Asteroid 2019 OK and what it would look like if, say, it hit the Philippines.
All in all, what Dr. Sese said is not comforting—the universe is out to kill us.
But he had the sense to sprinkle a good dose of “ha ha ha!” in his replies, which means it ain’t so bad. We are not so sure, though, if we’d pick him over the doomsday prepper as companion when the apocalypse comes. The prepper would have more cans of corned beef to eat, that’s for sure…
How near is 70,000 km in space terms?
Most geostationary telecommunications satellites—think the big ones—are at 36,000 km altitude above the Earth’s equator. So about twice the height of where most of our satellites are. In Earth-Moon distance, that’s about one-fifth of the way.
How fast would it have been going if it entered the earth’s atmosphere?
The speed of the asteroid is about 24 km/s or around 86,400 km/hr. That’s like traversing Edsa from MOA to Monumento in 1 second.
It was dubbed a ‘city killer’—if it had hit Manila would it have obliterated everything?
The mass is unknown since the actual size was not measured accurately, but estimates vary from 57 to 130 meters in diameter. While it looks small, the momentum is quite large because of its fast speed. It is about the same size as the Tunguska meteor that crashed in Russia in 1908 and flattened forests up to 2000 square miles. [BUT!!! It killed only THREE PEOPLE. Why? Because Tunguska is deep in Siberia].
Metro Manila is 619.4 sq km or 239 sq miles in total land area. So that asteroid could have erased an area ten times the size of the Metro. Yikes!
May nakita akong ganyang meme that the universe is trying to kill us. Which is true, ha ha ha!
News accounts say it was hard for astronomers to detect the asteroid. Does this mean we could likely not see another one like this coming?
This is not the first instance that asteroids have a near miss. It has happened in the past and it will happen again in the future. Detecting asteroids, especially small and non-reflective ones, are hard. Unless they significantly reflect light from the sun, their small size and large distance would make it hard to see them using telescopes. It’s like trying to see the SM Seaside Tower in Cebu from 70,000 km away. But make its color black—and try to detect it against a black background.
So we’ve been very lucky?
Lagi naman…so far.
Couldn’t an earth-wide Iron Dome [In Israel, they have a defense system that intercepts missiles launched by their enemy-neighbors] be created to thwart asteroids like these?
We have no capability yet for that a la Armageddon [the movie]. Plus, there’s a debate on what would be the best method to thwart asteroids. The Armageddon style of blowing it up causes more problems, more fragments kasi ang babagsak. Ang medyo favored from a technical sense is pushing it a bit from orbit, but the technology to do that is still not available.
Image from Conservative Papers
Of course, it won’t mean jack shit if you can’t find the psychokiller space rock to begin with.
Yes, it won’t mean jack shit if you can’t find the rock in the first place, ha ha ha!
