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dumbfoundded

There's a close pass of a 4km asteroid happening in April. It should miss us.

https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...

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"Should" is putting it a bit lightly. It has essentially zero chance of hitting us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(52768)_1998_OR2#2020_approach

What if it turns?

Then we have a much bigger problem than getting hit by an asteroid.

"That's no moon..."

Please stop spreading FUD. That's not even close to a close pass. From the linked article:

> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.

To be fair, various media outlets are also calling it a "close pass".

You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.

At a space scale it's a close pass.

A "close pass" here means "it may even be visible from Earth in a normal observatory sized telescope!"

Close pass isn't some FUD. It's a scientific definition. It's even defined in the article I linked.

You also have a few close ones coming up this weekend.

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/four-new-asteroids-are-appr...

I like https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks which gets its data from https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ the NASA JPL center for near Earth object studies. There aren't many that come closer than the moon...

Well that would likely eliminate SARS-CVD-2 so there'd be a silver lining...

Why, is this asteroid high in silver? Can we mine it? /s

Perhaps I should have written "silver plating"

I'm just not counting on should at this rate...

What if the asteroid strikes Yellowstone?

That can't happen twice.

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