I am really tired being fed nonsense news from “NASA” by the U.K. rag Daily Star about asteroids set to “collide with Earth’s orbit” or “asteroids crashing into earth’s orbit.”
I get links like this every few days. Here are two separate links to that effect:
Fake Asteroid Link 1 and Fake Asteroid Link 2.
It appears there is somebody who works at the Daily Star who specializes in fabricating pictures of earth from space with fiery balls or huge rocks heading for earth.
Note also that the headlines are “technically correct” since the asteroids never actually crash into earth, just into earth’s orbit. Earth’s orbit is a huge imaginary circle around the sun with an approximate length of 940 million kilometers. At any given time, the earth is only at one point along that giant circle. So yes, every day, lots of asteroids come close to that circle somewhere in space. That point in space can be on the other side of the sun, about 300 million kilometers away. It’ll take us 6 months to get there.
I don’t think I’d call it “crashing” when a space rock crosses over an imaginary line somewhere in space. Obviously, this fluff in the Daily Star is silly click bait and I don’t understand what causes it to show up so frequently in my social media feeds.
It’s another effort to dumb us down.
Even dumber is the fact that their information is extremely out of date. They say that NASA is “currently tracking around 2,000 asteroids, comets and other objects that could fly close to Earth.” I thought that number seemed awfully low, so I checked. According to a 2018 JPL article, “There are now over 18,000 known NEOs [Near Earth Objects] and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.” https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7194
It’s probably been rehashed for years and years. If we track 18,000 now, I’d think 2,000 was at least 5 years ago.