Lawmakers ordered the space agency to detect 90% of hazardous asteroids in a 2005 law, but they haven’t funded telescopes and spacecraft that are large enough to do the job, the US National Academies of Sciences concluded in a June report. The near-miss of the incoming asteroid points to a long-running fight between NASA and Congress to build a reliable way to watch for “potentially hazardous” asteroids. “This one did sneak up on us and it is an interesting story on the limitations of our current survey network,” Johnson wrote in a July 26 email. Other emails show internal agency scientists frustrated by a media response that called the event a “city killer” that “just missed the earth.” The emails were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and provide a detailed, behind-the-scenes look as NASA officials scrambled to figure out why the asteroid wasn’t spotted until it was nearly whizzing past Earth. “I wonder how many times this situation has happened without the asteroid being discovered at all.” “This object slipped through a whole series of our capture nets,” Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in an email to his colleagues two days after the July 25 flyby, describing what he called the “sneaky” space rock. Such an impact has been estimated to happen about once every 3,000 years. “If 2019 OK had entered and disrupted in Earth’s atmosphere over land, the blast wave could have created localized devastation to an area roughly 50 miles across,” according to a news release sent out by the agency weeks after the flyby. The flyby came five times closer to Earth than the distance to the moon - a close shave by astronomical standards. "2019 OK was spotted about 24 hrs ago.”įlying at nearly 55,000 miles per hour, the asteroid came lumbering by with little warning, first detected that day by a small observatory in Brazil. “Because there may be media coverage tomorrow, I'm alerting you that in about 30 mins a 57-130 meter sized asteroid will pass Earth at only 0.19 lunar distances (~48,000 miles),” wrote Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, in a July 24 email alert sent to other space agency experts. The football-field-sized asteroid, dubbed “2019 OK,” is also drawing attention to decades of congressional failures to fix the problem, experts say. Spotted just 24 hours before a relatively narrow miss with Earth, the incident reveals holes in NASA’s surveillance network to observe incoming space rocks. But perhaps more alarming than the flyby itself is how much it caught NASA by surprise, according to internal agency documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. In late July, a record-setting asteroid hurtled just 40,400 miles over Earth, the largest space rock to come so close in a century.
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