“I think it’s a good thing to have it happen the way it did,” said Keith Johnson, director of the Edelman Planetarium at Rowan University. Although hundreds of people were injured by broken glass and debris from the shockwave caused by the meteor, which exploded in the atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, no fatalities have been reported.
“But it does point out the need for us to take this into account,” Johnson said.
“We haven’t had something like this in a long time, and it’s something we really need to consider to have preparations for the future.”
The asteroid that came careering past the earth Friday, known as 2012 DA14, is comparatively small—about 150 feet in diameter—and was never on a course to crash into the surface, according a statement from NASA. But if you think 17,200 miles sounds like an enormous distance, think again. The asteroid, which will be closest to earth as it passes over the Indian Ocean but will still be invisible to the naked eye, will be passing by beneath the ring of weather and communications satellites circling the earth—practically next door, in astronomical terms. In the event that the asteroid did hit the surface, the damage it would cause would be far greater than that of the fragments that fell in Russia on Friday.
While meteorites, which are called meteoroids until they land on the ground, have been crashing into the earth throughout the planet’s existence, they general public was not educated on them until well into the twentieth century. Since then, there have been several famous crashes—notably the 1908 Tunguska event, in which a meteorite slammed into the Siberian forest, causing a massive explosion and destroying more than 800 square miles of trees.
More recently, in 1992, a meteorite crashed through the trunk of a Chevy Malibu parked in Peekskill, N.Y. The fireball caused by its journey through the atmosphere was visible all over the East Coast.