If you’re old enough to remember feeding coins into arcade games, then you surely remember Asteroids. And if you remember the game, then your shooting skills might come in handy on March 5th when a giant hunk of rock will crash into the planet! Actually, it won’t; I just wanted your attention. Asteroid 2013 TX68 is going to sail right by at a distance of around 10,000 miles, which might seem far, but in Space terms, that is pretty damn near. In fact, it should be visible to the naked eye.
The asteroid is 100 feet in diameter, making it twice as big of the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Siberia in February 2013. “If it did somehow enter the atmosphere, NASA said it would produce an airburst of about twice the energy as Chelyabinsk, which smashed windows and injured hundreds in Russia,” writes iflscience. While we’re lucky – this time – tracking near-Earth objects is a growing concern. NASA recently set up the rather cool-sounding Asteroid Defense Office, while Russia is considering using nuclear weapons to … well, basically, to do this.
