How close is close?

Near-Earth Asteroids. What are they?

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.

Simply looking at the table below may cause some of you to lose sleep. However, I’m hear to remind you that all is well, and you have more to worry about in traffic, driving to and from in your car.

So what the heck is an AU, you may ask. An astronomical measurement that equals, 92,955,807 miles or 149,597,870,700 meters. Putting that into perspective, the moon is 238,900 mi or 30 Earths away. So, if an asteroid comes within .05 AU’s to our planet, that’s still 4,647,790 miles or 7,479,892,950 meters.

However, today I discovered this interesting tidbit.

Below is the video Cleo was referring to.