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The Scariest Thing About Asteroids Is We Don’t See Them All Before They’re Near Earth

Jason Morton
5 min readMar 14, 2022

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It’s not a question of if, but a question of when Earth will be struck by a Mega-Asteroid, such as Apophis or Bennu. Asteroids are often not noticed until they pass us by, or are just hours from our atmosphere at incredible speeds into the thousands of miles per hour.

Could millions of lives be lost in an instant? Could humanity be wiped off the face of the earth before we knew it was going to happen? Could all of our lives depend on a relatively small amount of people looking for a celestial needle in a cosmic barn?

Don Davis/NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From Discovery To Impact

An asteroid was recently discovered just hours before it struck our atmosphere. On March 11th, 2022, Hungarian astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky uncovered an asteroid named 2022 EB5. While working at the Konkoly Observatory near Budapest Sarneczky realized that 2022 EB5 was heading directly for the planet.

Just two hours after discovering the asteroid, as it completed its’ approach to earth at 11 miles per second, 2022 EB5 impacted our atmosphere. 2022 EB5 was about 10 feet wide and sized somewhere between a large step ladder and a car.

Even though 2022 EB5 disintegrated, leaving only stories of people in Iceland reporting they heard an explosion…

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Jason Morton
Jason Morton

Written by Jason Morton

Currently, I'm a telecom tech, a grandfather, and fighting cancer. I enjoy writing and sharing opinions. I stumbled into some knowledge along my journey.

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