Asteroids and Such

Early this morning, a piece of rock 35 meters wide passed within 72,000 km of Earth. In the sense of space, that's a pretty close miss (about 1/5 the distance to the moon). Sky and Telescope has a short post about this even, as does Spaceweather. Bad Astronomy also has a post about it, but you won't be able to access it from a school computer (it's one of those dreaded blog-things...) It's important to note that this asteroid never posed a threat to Earth, even though it was only discovered a couple of days ago.

If you're tired of sleeping at night and want to give yourself something to worry about, scroll down on the Spaceweather site. You'll see that astronomers are currently tracking 1033 PHA's (potentially hazardous asteroids). These are large asteroids that have the potential of intersecting Earth's orbit at some point in the future.