Holy Close Call Batman, asteroid 2014 RC

AI Thread Summary
Asteroid 2014 RC, roughly the size of a house, is set to pass within 1,000 miles of Earth on September 7, 2014, making it a close encounter for our planet. Observers in the Southern Hemisphere may see it at magnitude +11.5 as it moves across the constellations Pictor and Puppis. The Virtual Telescope Project will stream the event live for those interested in watching. While this asteroid is not large enough to cause a global catastrophe, it could still have significant destructive potential, equivalent to a half-megaton nuclear explosion. The discussion highlights the limitations of current asteroid tracking programs, which primarily focus on larger objects, leaving smaller, potentially hazardous asteroids less monitored.
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Astronomy news on Phys.org
Wow, that's pretty close!
 
Drakkith said:
Wow, that's pretty close!

Another report puts it at just outside of Geosyn. Sat. Orbits, so I'm not sure which is correct.
In any case Southern Hemi observers with appropriate equipment might be able to catch it briefly at magnitude +11.5 traveling fast across the constellations Pictor and Puppis.
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This is yet another example of how vulnerable we are to NEO's. Granted, a house size boulder is not of doomsday proportions, but, still extremely dangerous. According to http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact/ an asteroid this size would pack the punch of a half megaton nuke, and can be expected to happen about every 20 years. The NEO program operated by JPL is intended to catalog bodies in the 1 kilometer class, so it offers no protection from mere house sized bodies. The potential hazardous asteroid catalog by NASA accounts for about 1500 objects, the vast majority of which are over 150 meters in size. More modest sized rocks are not catalogued because they are too small to be detected. A 150 meter rock would be equivalent to a 200 megaton nuke and trigger a magnitude 7 earthquake. Pretty scary stuff.
 

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