KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Russian meteor scare and a close encounter with an asteroid had us wondering if we were about to star in our own disaster movie. University of Missouri Kansas City’s Observatory opened Friday night to see if we could sneak a glimpse of the asteroid as it cut disturbingly close to Earth.
Joe Wright, operations manager at the Warkoczewski Observatory, said the meteor and asteroid within a couple of hours of each other, and apparently unrelated, is unusual.
The Russian meteor emitted sonic blasts nearly a thousand miles from Moscow, shattered windows and injured hundreds of people.
“Very impressive video, it’s not often you capture something that spectacular,” he said. “There’s so much floating around out there from the creation of the universe we can’t pinpoint every one. It will happen again but hopefully no one will be injured.”
But the real reason Wright opened up the observatory Friday night is to hopefully catch a glimpse of a 150 foot cosmic rock called Asteroid 2012 DA14. He says the meteor was unrelated to this main attraction for astronomers. The asteroid is the closest known fly by for a rock its size, at about 17-thousand miles. In astronomical terms, that’s a near miss.
“Communications satellites are 23-thousand miles, so it’s in between the Hubble space telescope and tv satellites, so it’s pretty close,” Wright said. “It is exciting to us, it’s a close fly by.”
Wright says there are as many as a million near-Earth size objects in space, but less than one percent have been inventoried
“This is a reminder we really need to be looking out for the rocks coming towards us,” he said.
Wright says we’ll never find them all, but amateurs and professionals alike need to continue to work to track them to avoid that disaster movie scenario
“And if we don’t do something about it, it could have a big impact on us,” he said, without sarcasm.
For more information about the Warko Observatory and upcoming events, click here:
askc.org.
