Asteroid 2012 LZ1 Twice as Big as Thought | Asteroid Threats | LiveScience

Asteroid 2012 LZ1
Asteroid 2012 LZ1 is roughly spherical and rotates once around every 10-15 hours. This detailed image was taken when the asteroid was 6 million miles (10 million kilometers) away. The resolution is 25 feet (7.5 meters), equivalent to seeing a basketball in New York City from Puerto Rico.
CREDIT: USRA

A massive asteroid that zipped by Earth last week is actually twice as large as scientists originally thought, new radar images of the behemoth space rock reveal.

Asteroid 2012 LZ1 sailed within 3.3 million miles (5.3 million kilometers) of Earth at its closest approach on June 14. Since that distance is roughly 14 times the distance between Earth and the moon, the oblong-shaped asteroid 2012 LZ1never posed a threat of colliding with our planet.

But the flyby did allow astronomers to train the planetary radar system at the [...]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebookand Google+.

Full article at livescience.com

No offense to science - I love it personally, just find it to be as limited as any other religion and maybe a little moreso given the strictures it places upon itself regarding having evidence and proof for everything - but it's kinda cute that they say in one breath, "Well, we misjudged it's size by, uh, a little," and in the next, "but we're sure that it can't hit us for at least 750 years." Really? You as sure about that as you were that it was only about the size of a city block? :D Funny scientists. :)

Posted via email from Moments of Awareness

Comments