Although no one seems to have noticed last week, precisely on November 6, an asteroid, though small, increased to 8700 miles from Earth. At a distance which is 30 less than the Moon.
What is relevant in this fact is not the danger of the asteroid in question, with its 8 feet in diameter, would have produced at best a nice fireworks display in the heavens, but rather the fact that it was located just 15 hours before pass close to our planet.
We can imagine that if the object was approaching largest might have been detected before, but it is only a supposition or wanting to be a sincere hope. Is there a program, the Near Earth Object Program at NASA, which is responsible for identifying and cataloging all the asteroids, large and small, whose orbits bring them closer to the Earth. But there are contingency plans in case the worst case scenario turns out?
More than anything there are many ideas, and maybe too much confused. (Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mitigation_strategies) When there is a procedure already established on what to do if it were needed. At least not in the public domain because the technology used could possibly still be top secret. And given the short notice we could be confronted with the fact that there are no specific programs is still worrying. We hope not to have to experiment.
For the record, the asteroid was named 2009Va, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey and subsequently identified by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge.
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