Close call

'Close call' with asteroid over the weekend raises concerns

David Perlman

An asteroid that was undetected until a week ago, sped closely past Earth on Sunday, serving as a warning that hidden and dangerous objects exist in space that could just as conceivably hit the planet and cause catastrophic destruction, a scientist said.

The big chunk of rock, which came within 25,000 miles from Earth, was discovered Aug. 31 as it flew over New Zealand in its long orbit around the sun.

The asteroid was about 60 feet wide, the same size as last year's Chelyabinsk meteor that broke apart into thousands of fragments in a violent airburst and injured 1,200 people.

"This asteroid is another reminder that really dangerous asteroids are surely headed our way, and we need to be warned ahead of time - a decade ahead," said Ed Lu, a former astronaut who heads an independent nonprofit organization, B-12 Foundation, to raise money to build a space telescope specifically designed to warn of such threats many years in advance.

"We have the technology to deflect them, but we need the time to do it," Lu said.

Designated 2014RC, the new-found asteroid - dubbed "the Pitbull" - never posed a danger to Earth, said David Morrison, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute in Mountain View.

Still, he said, "it's what is known as a potentially hazardous asteroid, so maybe it will come back even closer sometime in the future."

The asteroid was first detected by NASA's Catalina Sky Survey telescope at the University of Arizona and as it flew just above the ring of geosynchronous communications and weather satellites orbiting 22,300 miles above Earth's surface. The satellites were in no danger, NASA said.

But the real danger comes from the fact that no telescopes can yet detect asteroids speeding on a collision-course toward Earth in time to avert danger, Lu said.

A simplest solution to protecting Earth from one of them, Lu said, would be to "nudge" it out of the way with a small spacecraft.