Space is big. Really big. In just our little solar system neighborhood, the distances and expanses of empty space are hard for us to wrap our minds around. And there are a lot of loose little bits of rock and ice floating around, some in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and some on really long elliptical orbits that every now and then cross Earth’s orbit.
Now and then, one big enough to do some serious damage smacks into our little planet. The Tunguska Event was one of those. So was the space rock that created that big crater in Arizona. Now, NASA has a group that keeps track of objects that might slam into Earth; that would be the NASA Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Europe has a counterpart in the European Space Agency. On Wednesday, NASA announced the discovery of just such an object, which they calculate may hit Earth, and it has…
