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Earth-buzzing asteroid: Big enough to level a city, it was found by amateurs

Asteroid 2012 DA14 will set a record when it zips by within 17,000 miles of Earth next week. The 150-foot object was discovered by a team of dedicated amateur astronomers in southern Spain.

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer
February 5, 2013


Diagram depicting the passage of asteroid 2012 DA14 through the Earth-moon system on Feb. 15, 2013.

The solar system is sending Earth a fleeting Valentine's greeting in the form of asteroid 2012 DA14, which makes a whisker-close (cosmically speaking) approach on Feb. 15.

The rocky asteroid, which measures roughly 150 feet across, is predicted to pass within 17,000 miles of Earth's surface, slipping below the 22,236-mile altitude where major weather and communications satellites operate, but well above low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station and the vast majority of satellites hurtle around the planet.

Its close encounter with Earth is expected to shift its orbit enough to shave 51 days off of its current 368-day orbital period.

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Such an event wouldn't be a civilization buster, but it could put a world of hurt on a major metropolitan area, suggests Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif.

In 1908, a similarly sized object plummeted through the atmosphere and burst above the Siberian forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, some 480 miles northeast of Krasnoyarsk. The air-burst flattened an estimated 80 million trees in a blast zone that covered 830 square miles, comparable in size to Louisville, Ky., or San Diego, Calif.

"This would have leveled a city," says Dr. Betts.

Since astronomers began efforts dedicated to the search for near-Earth objects around 1995, some 9,668 have been discovered. Of those, 861 are more than half a mile wide, while 1,373 are considered potentially hazardous.

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"These small objects can appear at any moment," says Dr. Nomen, who notes that he has cut his once full-time dental practice down to two days a week to allow for more observing and more-rapid processing of the images the telescope takes.

Indeed, he and his team discovered another object much like 2012 DA14 on Feb. 4 and are awaiting confirmation of the siting from other observatories, he said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. Initial calculations of the object's orbit suggest it won't pass as close to Earth as 2012 DA14. Two days ago, calculations suggested that the object, estimated at 100 to 130 feet across, would make its closest approach to Earth some 72,000 miles beyond the moon.

Moonlit nights and bouts of cloudy weather slow the pace of discovery of objects in this size range.

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Hmm, looks like the discoverers had no good prospects for Valentine's Day, so they instead went to look for heavenly bodies.



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Better deal? That remains to be seen, er, felt...

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