Earth Will Have a Close Encounter With ‘Doomsday Rock’ at 14:30 EST, October 26, 2028

The Earth, and our closest neighbor the Moon are covered with pockmarks from historical asteroid strikes. Dozens of movies show intrepid heroes blowing them up and saving the Earth, but in real life we don’t yet have a system in place that would give us a reprieve should one of these space rocks come our way.

In 2028, asteroid 1997XF11 will pass extremely close to our planet. NASA predicts it will miss, and I really hope they are right. But what will happen to Earth if they’re not?

1997XF11 was discovered by Jim Scotti of the University of Arizona during the Spacewatch program. Further studies of the asteroid revealed that there will be a particularly close pass in October 2028.

Computaions ten years ago said that the event will take place at 13:30 Eastern daylight time on October 26th 2028. They put the ‘miss distance’ at a mere 26,000 miles.

The latest update to this alters the time by just an hour to 14:30 EST on the same date but they have stated the miss distance will be 600,000 miles and have discounted the possibility of the asteroid hitting Earth.

Lets seriously hope they are right.

1997XF11 is a lump of rock about a mile wide. If something were to change and it did impact Earth it would hit at 30,000 miles per hour with a force of a one million megaton bomb. That’s ten million times the explosive force of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

It’s hard to imagine that amount of force. To put it into context, a 200 mile area from ground zero would be totally annihilated. Everything within a thousand miles of ground zero would suffer severe damage.

The dust and debris thrown up from such a collision would block out sunlight and disrupt the food chain for an extended period causing mass extinctions and human deaths on an unprecedented scale.

It’s possible that a few pockets of people would survive, but they would face a stone age future as the infrastructure would be gone with little chance of restoration for generations.

1997XF11 landing in the ocean would not be good, but it would be better. A mega-tsunami would hit coastlines across the globe. Steam and debris would cause a massive drop in the sunlight getting down to the Earths surface which would again affect the food chain, but less solid debris means a faster recovery. There would possibly be more survivors with the ocean model but as we have never experienced such an impact nothing is certain.

Space is a very hostile environment, and there are lots of things that can happen between now and 2028. Lets hope if something does alter its course it moves further away rather than closer to us.

Sources/further reading:

http://www.britastro.org/jbaa/archive/marsden.htm

http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/pressinfo/1997XF11.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/asteroid-hits-earth.htm

http://science.time.com/2013/02/14/asteroid-hits-earth-how-the-doomsday-scenario-would-play-out/

http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s5.htm