There’s An Asteroid The Size Of Ten Buses Hurtling Towards Earth

A huge space rock bigger than ten buses stacked end to end is hurtling towards Earth.

NASA says the asteroid, scientifically called 2013 WV44, will soar past at about 9 am BST on Wednesday.

The rock is estimated to be up to 524 feet (160 metres) in diameter, which is bigger than both the London Eye (394 feet) and Big Ben (310 feet).

It will be travelling at a speed of 11.8 km per second or over 26,000 miles per hour, approximately 34 times the speed of sound.

Although hurtling towards Earth, it won’t ever get closer than 0.02334 astronomical units or around 2.1 million miles.

Despite being about nine times further out than the moon, the asteroid is classed as a near-Earth object (NEO) and is being tracked by NASA.

NASA said that NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood.

Composed primarily of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due primarily to their status as the relatively unchanged remnant debris from the solar system formation process some 4.6 billion years ago.

A NEO is defined as such when it comes within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) (120.8 million miles) of the sun and hence within 0.3 AU (27.8 million miles) of Earth’s orbit.

Although 2013 WV44 will be at a distance of 2.1 million miles away, this is somewhat close in astronomical terms.

NASA lists it as one of the upcoming close approaches on its online tracker, which compiles upcoming objects that are getting closer and closer to Earth.

An asteroid is defined as potentially dangerous if it comes within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65 million miles) of Earth and is larger than 459 feet (140 meters) in diameter.

Thankfully, 2013 WV44 doesn’t meet those specifications so it’s not deemed potentially dangerous, but could still come within our orbit.

Earth’s ‘Hill sphere’, the region around it where its own gravity is the dominant force attracting satellites, has a radius of 932,000 miles (0.1 AU).

At around 2.1 million miles or 0.02334 AU, 2013 WV44 should enter the Hill sphere.

So, this is no threat to us, which can only be a good thing because Bruce Willis isn’t up to sorting it out these days, and it’s faster than Road Runner or Coyote being shot out of a cannon.

The best that we can do now is get a new booster shot because evidently it protects against COVID and perhaps now even hurricanes and asteroids.

Perhaps they should try to send it to Russia. I’m sure Vladimir Putin hasn’t got a deterrent for that one.

Evidently, it’s hurtling towards Earth, but won’t get near to us, so why even mention it? And if one were to potentially head towards Earth and it was going to hit us, do you think anybody would actually tell us?

This is just a scare tactic, although I’m not really sure for what reason. I suppose so they can divert attention from what’s actually going on in the world.

Each day newspaper outlets publish some phoney baloney crisis article as a way of trying to intimidate the less educated people in their audience. This is not a disaster. I can’t hear any warning sirens or see people packing their suitcases to get out of town, not that it would do them any good anyhow. Crisis – no propaganda!