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Too Close!

Clayton Cramer's BLOG: "A 30 meter asteroid is going to pass by the Earth this afternoon at a distance of 26,500 miles. According to this report, some people on Earth should be able to see it with good binoculars. That's way too close for comfort:
A small near-Earth asteroid (NEA), discovered Monday night by the NASA-funded LINEAR asteroid survey, will make the closest approach to Earth ever recorded. There is no danger of a collision with the Earth during this encounter.

The object, designated 2004 FH, is roughly 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter and will pass just 43,000 km (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters) above the Earth's surface on March 18th at 5:08 PM EST (2:08 PM PST, 22:08 UTC). (Close approach details here). My recollection from my readings about the Canyon Diablo meteor crater in Arizona was that it was excavated by a roughly 30 meter nickel-iron asteroid, and killed everything around it for many miles. (The nickel-iron meteors recovered from the area aren't really chunks of the original; they are what happened when the nickel-iron vapor froze.)

UPDATE: More details about the collision. Yes, I had the size right:
Fifty thousand years ago a huge boulder crashed into the desert flatlands in what is now Arizona leaving behind a bowl-shaped hole 4,000 feet wide and 570 feet deep. A study published in the journal Science concludes the stone that came in from space that day was a nickel iron meteor 100 feet in diameter and weighing 60,000 tons, traveling at speed of almost 45,000 miles an hour."

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