No matter how badly you want an asteroid to hit Earth, it’s not happening this weekend
Maybe next time. (DepositPhotos/)You might have seen a few alarming headlines about a ‘planet killer’ headed for Earth this weekend. But don’t worry: rumors of our impending death by asteroid have been greatly exaggerated. This weekend, the object known as 2002 PZ39 will totally fail to hit our planet. It will instead sail on, its continuing mission to seek out new life and new things to bump into. This asteroid is estimated to be between 481.2 yards and 1083 yards in diameter, and astronomers have been tracking it for some time (since 2002, in fact, hence the name). “The trajectory of this asteroid is very well known,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies tweeted on Thursday. On Saturday, it will pass Earth at a safe distance of 3.59 million miles—”about 15 times the distance of the Moon,” they tweeted. The thing about words like “close”...