The Asteroid That Almost Hit the Earth

My older son has been really into space lately and he got a telescope as a birthday present. Needless to say, the asteroid was very big news in our house.

For those of you who haven’t heard, a 1,300-foot wide space rock (Asteroid 2005 YU55) thankfully missed Earth at 6:28 PM yesterday. It was traveling about 29,000 miles per hour when it passed us. This asteroid came closer than any others have since 1976 and it was only 201,700 miles away from our planet, which means at one point it was even closer to us than the moon.

An astronomer discovered the asteroid six years ago during one of his regular scans. NASA spends almost $5 million every year searching for asteroids that could potentially crash into our planet.

Government budgets are tight and some people don’t understand spending funds on our space program. This asteroid was a really good reminder of why we need to be paying attention to what’s going on out there.