Another piece of space rock, without much advance warning, will shave close to the earth this evening — known as 2000 EM26, the 885-foot wide asteroid (about three football fields) is scheduled to zap past us about 6 PM PST (9 PM EST).
Although the chunk will supposedly clear the planet by 2.7 million miles, and again supposedly, poses no threat to our well-being, the asteroid is still considered dangerous: But it is defined as a potentially hazardous near-Earth object (NEO) large enough to cause significant damage in the event of an impact.
Big blow out if these guys numbers are off.

You can watch the event at the online sky-watching website, Slooh, and also at NASA’s Space.com.
And hopefully, we’ll dodge the bullet.

(Illustration found here).

Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the 10,000-ton meteor exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing damage and injury. And there’s a shitload of other rocks coming at us, too.
From IScienceTimes:

That one, which exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, was about 40 meters wide, but it caused more than 1,000 injuries on the ground after it exploded with the strength of a nuclear bomb.
This asteroid, designated 2000 EM26, is about 270 meters wide.
An impact with something that large would be catastrophic to an entire region.
…
“We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids — sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth,” says Paul Cox, Slooh’s technical and research director, in a statement.
“Slooh’s asteroid research campaign is gathering momentum with Slooh members using the Slooh robotic telescopes to monitor this huge population of potentially hazardous space rocks.”
Cox is being fairly generous; scientists have no idea where most of the asteroids this size are.
NASA researchers whose job it is to identify these rocks learned about the Chelyabinsk meteor about an hour after it hit — on Twitter.
This asteroid, 2000 EM26, is actually one of fewer than 11,000 asteroids whose orbits are known.
Most estimates suggest that there are 1 million more out there whizzing around the sun in an orbit that crosses the Earth’s orbit.

An interesting episode — live on the InterWebs.