Another Huge Asteroid Bypasses Earth
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iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — If you were watching the Olympics Monday night, you might’ve missed an asteroid the size of three-football fields zipping past the Earth at 27,000 mph.
In truth, the only way to have seen asteroid 2000 EM26 was by viewing it through the website of either the Slooh Space Camera or Space.com, which broadcasted the event live as it was happening around 9 p.m. Eastern time.
Asteroid 2000 EM26 wasn’t particularly close to the Earth — it was about 8.8 lunar distances or just over two million miles away. At 885 feet in diameter, scientists didn’t want it any closer than that.
It was on February 15, 2013, that an asteroid just 65 feet in diameter exploded in the skies above Chelyabinsk, Russia, with the force of 20 atomic bombs. While two dozen people received burns and a thousand were hurt from broken glass caused by shock wave damage, no lives were lost.
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