Today is Near Miss Day. I had no idea what that was, but it was kind of interesting to see it pop up. Even more interesting to find out what it was all about.
Near Miss Day is to mark the day in 1989 that we almost got hit by an asteroid.
I don’t really remember this. But maybe I wasn’t really paying attention. But apparently an asteroid names 4581 Asclepius came with 500,000 miles of hitting the earth. I know that sounds like a long ways, but it’s not far in space terms. At the time, it was thought of as a near miss.
And the part I really like? No one even noticed this thing until nine days after it went by. Something the size of a mountain flew by, and no one noticed.
Of course, things have changed a bit. We now seem to have a much better idea of what is zipping past us. And we have tested hitting asteroids with an rocket and moving it off course. So as long as we see them coming, we should be able to avoid them. Or at least that’s the theory.
In some ways, maybe it was a good thing we didn’t know this asteroid was coming so close to us. If the past couple years have taught us anything, it doesn’t take much for us to make all the toilet paper disappear from store shelves.