Don’t Panic: It’s Just Another Asteroid

People ask me all the time: “Hey, did you hear about that asteroid?” These people then tell me about some asteroid that’s supposed to “just barely miss us” is the next day or so. Sometimes, they also ask, “Aren’t you worried?”

There are certain kinds of space news that I simply can’t get excited about anymore. This is one of them. Why?

There’s actually a newsletter about asteroid flybys. It’s called Daily Minor Planet, and I have a subscription (it’s free). Every day in my inbox, I’m notified of the latest asteroid or other object skimming past Earth. Every day. Sometimes there are more than one per day.

Occasionally, one of these objects will pass within the radius of the Moon’s orbit. That’s not an everyday thing, but still… it happens more often than you might think.

So when people ask if I’ve heard about the latest asteroid flying past Earth, the only thing I can really say is, “Which one?” And if someone asks me if I’m worried, my answer is no. The asteroids that make headlines on the news and the asteroids that appear in Daily Minor Planet… those are asteroids we know about. It’s all the asteroids we don’t know about that scare the bejesus out of me.