* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Asteroid 2004 AS1

Blobrana · L

The 210 - 470 metre wide asteroid 2004 AS1 will make a close pass (50.0 lunar distances, 0.1286 AU), travelling at 12.85 km/second, to the Earth-Moon system on the 9th February 2014 @ 19:54 UT ±00:01.

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The Lunar Distance (LD), the distance between Earth and the Moon, equals 384,401 km, (or 0.00256 AU).

Blobrana · L

Astronomers came within minutes of alerting the world to a potential asteroid strike last month. On 13 January, 2004, a 30m object, 2004 AS1, was predicted to have a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours.
It could have caused local devastation and the researchers contemplated a call to the President before new data finally showed there was no danger.
The procedures for raising the alarm in such circumstances are now being revised.
At the time, the president's team would have been putting the final touches to a speech he was due to make the following day at the headquarters of Nasa, the US space agency.
In it he planned to reset the course of manned spaceflight, sending it back to the Moon and on to Mars, but he could have had something very different to say.
At about 30m wide, the asteroid was big enough to cause considerable damage after exploding in the atmosphere.
2004 AS1 turned out to be bigger than anyone had thought - about 500m wide. It passed the Earth at a distance of about 12 million-km - 32 times the Earth-Moon distance.