Inner and Outer Space

OK- you folks probably wondered what happened to the Meadster the first of this week. Answer is that yours truly had the tummy flu on Monday. Yes, it was a quality day with reguritation (VOMITING!) and fever. Tuesday was fever and no vomiting. Today no fever and no vomiting. How can it get any better? I was certain that you all would want the specifics (chuckle) Am starting to eat today. My private nurse has been wonderful.


Last night on the NBS news, Brian Williams had a small announcement that we humans missed a catastrophic event here on earth. Seems a large asteroid just missed our planet. If it had impacted earth it would have the effect of 1000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Why did anyone not tell us? If an asteroid is going to impact the ole earth, are we going down the tubes in ignorance? If this happened it would make Wall Street, global warming, and Russ Limbaugh moot points.

Here are a few more specifics on the near miss.

The Earth has had a near miss this week when a huge asteroid whizzed past, less than 50,000 miles away.

The asteroid had been spotted by astronomers monitoring the skies. (And keeping it a secret from we nonastronomers!)

The asteroid - about the size of a 10-story building - flew past the Earth at roughly twice the distance of the highest Earth-orbiting satellites, according to website space.com.

It is similar in size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908, flattening 80 million trees across an 800 square mile area.

The impact had the force of a thousand atomic bombs, astronomers say.

Asteroid 2009 DD45 was closest to the earth on Monday at around 8.30am, at just under 45,000 miles above the surface of the planet.

Astronomers knew it was coming after it was spotted last Saturday as a faint dot showing up in pictures at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

There was never any risk of collision, experts said, but anything flying within 50,000 miles of the Earth is taken very seriously.




The closest listed "flyby" to Earth by an asteroid happened in March 2004 when a small one - 2004 FU162 - measuring about 20 feet across came within about 4,000 miles of the earth.

Asteroids are rocks ranging in size from a few feet to several miles in diameter.