Buzzing by at 12 miles per second, the space rock known as 2009 DD45 passed within cosmic spitting distance of the Earth on Monday. The Near Earth Object (NEO) was discovered last week by Australian astronomers, and was easily tracked by NASA and others as it flew past Earth. In the past, asteroids were harder to follow, but advances in technology made 2009 DD45 as predictable as the order you put on your socks.
Computer World, our leading experts on random technological information that we don’t really need to know about, explains: “All of the data collected about the asteroid was fed into a program running on a Dell server running eight processors and Unix software. The program, called Sentry, used all the information to automatically make calculations about the asteroid’s path, its proximity to Earth and impact probabilities.”
All told, the NEO was about the same height above our satellites as the satellites are to the Earth. When it passed Tahiti at 13:44 Universal Time, 2009 DD45 was only one-fifth the distance to the Moon. It measured between 69 and 154 feet across.
These types of space rock fly-bys are surprisingly common, and many asteroids simply burn up in our atmosphere. In fact, an asteroid did just that about a century ago. On June 30, 1908 an asteroid of similar proportion to 2009 DD45 hit Earth: it broke into pieces before making impact, but the largest piece leveled trees in Siberia for 840 square miles.
In case you weren’t in Tahiti for DD45’s nighttime passage, you may get a second chance. Because its orbit is in an orbit that intersects Earth’s, DD45 may swing by again. Stay tuned.
“Because its orbit is in an orbit that intersects Earth’s, DD45 may swing by again.” Intriguing! That wouldn’t happen to be in December 2012, would it?