Absurdly close asteroid (DD45) miss

Not a Dino killer, but big enough to take out Manhattan and more (emphases mine) ...

PASADENA, Calif. — An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest [jf: about 40 meters diameter] in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported...

... "This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Wednesday...

... Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia spotted 2009 DD45 and began tracking it in late February when it was about 1 million miles away.

Spahr said he knew within an hour of that discovery that it would pose no threat to Earth.

Of the known space rocks, the next time an object will get closer to Earth will be in 2029 when an 885-foot [jf: about 270 m] asteroid called 99942 Apophis comes within 20,000 miles, said Donald Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena...

So, yeah, it's too bad about the meltdown of world markets, but imagine if DD45 had been a wee bit closer than this ...

The astonishing thing is that we can spot these things and estimate impacts so precisely. Anophis is vastly bigger and vastly more lethal -- and it will pass even closer a mere twenty years from now. (Are we really that good at prediction? Sheesh.)

More coverage ...

Asteroids: Uh, We Almost Got Asteroided Yesterday

A 30-50 meter-wide asteroid just passed seven times closer to us than the moon, glowing so bright you could see it through a cloud. If it had hit the ocean, it would have tsunamied....

The Sydney Morning Herald says that if it had been headed toward a populated part of the world, we would have had 24 hours to act and evacuate...

To put it into perspective, here's io9's list of scariest asteroid attacks on Earth, not including this one...

I recommend the io9 list.

We really do need to be grateful at having missed this one. The galaxy is not kind; sometimes ignorance really is bliss.