Asteroid close call is a ‘Celestial Torpedo’

An asteroid about the size of a 15-story building that will “narrowly” streak by the planet Earth on Friday ought to serve as a warning that a serious collision is ‘a matter of time,’ said former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart on Thursday.

The asteroid 2012 DA14, Schweickart said in an interview with RIA Novosti, “is a celestial torpedo shooting across our spaceship bow and it ought to get our attention, it should tell us this happens all the time.”

“We get hit on average every 300 years or so, and we don’t live that long, so we don’t think about it,” he said. “But there’s a million objects about 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter or larger that cross the earth’s orbit, and we’ve found less than one percent of them, so a significant collision is just a matter of time.”

Officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) don’t see it that way.

“NASA monitors these kinds of objects all the time and there’s a lot of analysis about projecting orbits, it’s a very detailed science and we’ve become very good at that,” said NASA spokesman Steve Cole in an interview with RIA Novosti.

“With global telescopes scanning 24/7 you can see even small objects pretty far away, and once you have a lot of observations you can calculate the orbit forward and know where it’s going to be in the future,” he said.

Space experts agree the 2012 DA14 is not a threat to Earth.

Campins is part of NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission which is scheduled to launch a spacecraft to an asteroid in 2016.
It’s a research mission that could help scientists learn how to tap into the resources asteroids have, including water and other materials.

Valuable information, said Schweickart, but more needs to be done to help the planet Earth avoid what he sees as an inevitable collision.

“NASA has always and will always play down the potential for impact, that’s just the nature of a government entity,” he said. “But it’s a shooting gallery out there, and if we do our work we can save lives.”