Posted on: Friday, June 21, 2002

Asteroid just misses collision with Earth

By Thomas Wagner
Associated Press

LONDON — An asteroid the size of a soccer field missed the Earth by 75,000 miles — less than a third of the distance to the moon and one of the closest known approaches by objects of this size, scientists said yesterday.

"In the unlikely event the asteroid had struck Earth in a populated area, it would have caused considerable loss of life," said scientist Grant Stokes. "The energy release would be of the magnitude of a large nuclear weapon."

Stokes is the principal investigator for the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Project, whose New Mexico observatory spotted the object last week.

"It was a close shave," said another scientist, Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. His organization gathers information on all such encounters.

The asteroid was not detected until three days after it came close to the Earth on June 14. When such asteroids are detected, it's usually well out in space as they approach or depart Earth.

The asteroid, provisionally nam-ed 2002 MN, was traveling at more than 23,000 mph when it was spotted, said Stokes, who is associate head of the aerospace division of MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Massachusetts.

With a diameter of between 50 and 120 yards, the asteroid was about the size of a soccer field, which is about 105 yards by 75 yards, Stokes said. The size of asteroids is estimated by measuring their brightness.

Although lightweight compared with some asteroids, 2002 MN was big enough to have caused devastation similar to the impact of one in Siberia in 1908. On that occasion, an asteroid that exploded above Tunguska flattened nearly 800 square miles of forest. The asteroid's air blast was believed to have done the damage, since no crater was found.

In general, damage on the ground depends on what an asteroid is made of, varying from solid metal to a loosely bound aggregate.

Benny Peiser, an expert on near-Earth objects at Liverpool John Moore's University in England, said the latest "reminder" comes as Britain tests telescopes on the Spanish island of La Palma to search for the objects.

"Such near misses do highlight the importance of detecting these objects," he said.

There is no dedicated program searching for objects of 2002 MN's size. NASA concentrates its efforts on bodies bigger than a kilometer (.62 of a mile) across.

"NASA has a goal of discovering and obtaining good orbits for all the near-Earth objects with diameters larger than 1 kilometer," said Thomas Morgan, a scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington. "Asteroids of this size could potentially destroy civilization as we know it."

Such asteroids could theoretically hit Earth every million years, or at longer intervals.

Asteroids the size of 2002 MN are estimated to hit the Earth every 100 to several hundred years, causing local damage, but no disaster to civilization or the planet's ecosystem, Stokes said.

"It's something the public should know about, but shouldn't get nervous about," he said. "Civilization has to get used to them on some level."