Yesterday we had two Near Earth Asteroids pass between our planet and our lovely moon. One of them actually passed by at less than a quarter of the distance to the moon. Happily, it passed by instead of hitting us and with room to spare. This story from space.com has a decent summary. What they don't appear to mention is the additional good news that the asteroids were detected ahead of time, as pointed out in NEO Program's story. Granted, it was only two days, but that might have given people in an impact area enough time to get out of the way if they didn't work up a huge panic. Also note that the smaller of the rocks was under 50 feet in diameter, so seeing that two days out is a good sign. For kicks, you can visit the calculator provided by the Earth Impact Effects Program in the UK to see what might have happened if either of these rocks had actually hit us. Here is one guess with the smaller rock if you were a mile away, and it's really not that bad, as long as you're not right near the impact point(s). Heck, even the larger one wouldn't even leave a crater. So perhaps we can conclude that there's real progress with the NEO program in earlier detection of dangerous objects.
