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Earth has another close encounter with large asteroid
February 18, 2014 – SPACE - An
asteroid estimated to be the size of three football fields whizzed
close to Earth on Monday, roughly a year after one exploded over Russia
and injured 1,200 people. Slooh Space Camera tracked the approach of
the asteroid as it raced past the planet at about 27,000 mph (43,000
kmph), starting at 9 p.m. EST (2 a.m. GMT, Feb. 18), the robotic
telescope service said in a statement on Slooh.com. The Dubai Astronomy
Group provided Slooh photos of the part of the sky where the rock was
expected to be seen, but its motion could not be picked out immediately
in a live webcast against the backdrop of night-time stars. The
295-yard (270-m) asteroid was streaking past Earth at a distance of
about 2.1 million miles (3.4 million km) little more than a year after
another asteroid exploded on Feb. 15, 2013, over Chelyabinsk, Russia.
That asteroid injured 1,200 people following a massive shock wave that
shattered windows and damaged buildings. Chelyabinsk region officials
had wanted to mark the anniversary by giving a piece of the meteorite to
each 2014 Winter Olympic athlete who won a medal on Saturday at the
Sochi Games. However, the International Olympic Committee at the last
minute said it could be done only after the games and separately.
Slooh’s flagship observatory on Mount
Teide in Spain’s Canary Islands was iced over and unable to be used for
the 2000 EM26 viewing, Paul Cox, Slooh’s technical and research
director, said on the one-hour webcast. “We continue to discover these
potentially hazardous asteroids – sometimes only days before they make
their close approaches to Earth,” Cox said in a statement before the
show. He added, “We need to find them before they find us!” –Economic Times
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