With all of the high tech at NASA’s disposal, you would think that they would have noticed a 427-foot-wide asteroid barreling towards Earth, but sometimes things slip past their watch. On Friday, the massive asteroid, now named 2019 OK, got within 45,000 miles of Earth as it passed.
While that might seem like an astronomical number, that’s only 20% of the distance between the Earth and the moon, so in universal terms, that qualifies as a pretty narrow miss.
A “City-Killer” Asteroid
2019 OK is classified as a “city killer” asteroid, which can hit Earth with the force of multiple nuclear bombs and could destroy entire cities. While NASA and other agencies have technology to track objects like this, there isn’t enough funding to observe every single one. NASA manages to track less than one third of the major asteroids.
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