DISASTER AVOIDED: Asteroid which we did not even notice almost missed the EARTH

On Saturday, astronomers have discovered a new asteroid, just a few hours before he could have landed on Earth

Asteroid which has a name 2016 QA2, missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the way between the Earth and the Moon. It puts this asteroid around three times further from earth compared to our furthest satellite. And we did not even see it coming. 

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So how was 2016 QA2 managed to sneak up on us? For this particular asteroid, the answer is that he has a very strange orbit. It is elliptical, meaning it can often be found around Mars or Venus, or very rarely near Earth.

But another, more troubling problem is that not many people are searching for potentially hazardous asteroids. The US Congress gave NASA the task of finding 90 percent of the asteroids larger than 130 meters by 2020 but this American agency decided not to fulfill this task. Financing for finding asteroids is very low and most telescopes that can detect these celestial bodies won't be online and available for a few years.

Even if NASA was on the track to fulfill this requirement, they would still miss 2016 QA2 because its width was between 15 and 30 meters. Asteroids of this size are so small that there is nothing we can do to locate them, but they can make a lot of damage if the collision with Earth occurred. Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded above Russia in 2013 damaged many buildings and injured 1500 people. This asteroid was only 16 meters wide.

As far as the asteroid concerns, for now we were lucky. But if we don't strengthen the locating and detection of this celestial bodies, it is only the matter of time when new disaster will happen.

(Telegraf.co.uk)