I thought you all might want to be aware of an asteroid that has a 99.8% to 100% chance of hitting earth, sometime early the morning of the 7th of October.
An asteroid measuring several feet in diameter is expected to enter the atmosphere over northern Sudan before dawn Tuesday, setting off a potentially brilliant natural fireworks display.
snip
The event is expected to occur at 5:46 a.m. local time (10:46 p.m. EDT Monday).
Duck past the fold...
fortunately it will likely miss you. This asteroid is only a couple of meteors across and will make quite a show as burns up. Get ready to make your shooting star wishes, as it may sizzle out in the Red Sea.
Apparently, this kind of thing happens frequently. But we just don't look up enough at night
Here's the info from Nasa:
Orbital Elements at Epoch 2454746.5 (2008-Oct-07.0) TDB
Reference: JPL 8 (heliocentric ecliptic J2000)
Element Value Uncertainty (1-sigma) Units
e .3120703512603317 6.3662e-06
a 1.308209579133379 9.5935e-06 AU
q .8999561562510943 1.7682e-06 AU
i 2.54224730287879 4.5496e-05 deg
node 194.101135985765 4.2733e-06 deg
peri 234.4489305462693 0.00011254 deg
M 330.7545024547703 0.00041288 deg
tp 2454790.898768860418
(2008-Nov-20.39876887) 0.00014732 JED
period 546.5305134587315
1.50 0.0060118
1.646e-05 d
yr
n .6587006418392476 7.2457e-06 deg/d
Q 1.716463002015663 1.2587e-05 AU
If anyone knows how to decipher this info please feel free to do so.
Orbit Determination Parameters
# obs. used (total) 466
data-arc span 1 day
first obs. used 2008-10-06
last obs. used 2008-10-07
planetary ephem. DE405
SB-pert. ephem. SB405-CPV-2
quality code 4
fit RMS .47252
data source ORB
producer Otto Matic
solution date 2008-Oct-06 17:50:03
Additional Information
Earth MOID = 7.80388E-6 AU
T_jup = 4.929
This link has an animation of the approach of 2008 TC3..