Last Saturday the world nearly ended and we didn’t even know it—okay an impending apocalypse maybe an over-exaggeration but astronomers did discovered an asteroid, just a few hours before it nearly hit Earth.
Named 2016 QA2, it narrowly missed the Earth by less than a quarter of distance to the moon. In layman’s terms, it means that the asteroid was about three times as far away from our planet as the furthest satellites. Basically we we’re at deaths door and we were none the wiser.
The reason the asteroid was spotted late was due to 2016 QA2’s 'peculiar' orbit. More worrying though is the fact that NASA, or any of the other international space programs, aren’t on the look out for potentially dangerous asteroids. All we have to do is cast our minds back to 2013 when an asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia which damaged multiple buildings and injured over 1500 people.
It’s like we’ve not learnt anything from films like Armageddon and Deep Impact. Must we really undergo another 'save the world from destruction' song from Aerosmith?
[Via Esquire]
