Giant asteroid flying by Earth next week looks like it's wearing a face mask

[smp]

From CNN.com:
"(CNN - )An asteroid estimated to be 1.2 miles wide will fly by Earth next week, but it's not expected to collide with our planet.
And if an asteroid could be aware of such things, it appears to be wearing a face mask in deference to the pandemic, according to new images from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
The asteroid is called 52768 (1998 OR2), and it was first spotted in 1998.
On April 29, it will pass within 3,908,791 miles of Earth, moving at 19,461 miles per hour. That's still 16 times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/world/as ... index.html

smp

[Makuser]

Hi Stephen. A very interesting article on asteroid 1998 OR2. And wearing a face mask? Thanks for putting this link up on here Stephen, and keep the space news coming.

[Buckethead 2.0]

Hi Stephen. A very interesting article on asteroid 1998 OR2. And wearing a face mask? Thanks for putting this link up on here Stephen, and keep the space news coming.

"Spacial distancing" at it's finest! Thank you, smp

[AntennaGuy]

This is a related article: "Why NASA plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-BB13kgeb

FYI: I'm not so sure that the following statement agrees fully with the physics that I learned:
"“A ricochet would be a really poor outcome, meaning a lot of the momentum is lost,” Syal says." Hmm. Perhaps by "richochet" they meant a glancing blow, as opposed to a (more-or-less) direct-in-line hit & reflection. After all, if it were a direct (not glancing) hit, an elastic collision (if possible) would transfer more momentum (along the path of the projectile striking the asteroid) than an inelastic collision would.

[helicon]

I guess by now we know we will be OK here on mother Earth. Some of the more click-baity sites had dire predictions of impending doom.

[yobbo89]

Who cares tell me when one hits us.. . 16.3 million kilometres away, 16x the distance of the moon. "Media hype close call" to entertain the general population that are not into astronomy, much like giving a full moon a new name each time "super blue red blood wolf moon blah blah blah" , it's just the moon on an elliptical orbit. Don't get me wrong, I like asteroids and moons, just the media needs to turn it down a bit .

[Gfamily]

In terms of size and distance, it's about equivalent to a Smart Car in Seattle 'driving past' a person in London.