Asteroids Toutatis and XE54 Pass Close To Earth

Asteroids Toutatis and XE54 give Earth a close flyby last week. Toutatis passes  by Earth every 4 years at a distance of  4 million miles and it’s clearly visible  with a telescope.

The new asteroid, XE54 discovered just  last week, came “a little too close for comfort,”  within 140,000 miles of our planet. It came  ”about as close to crashing into Earth as an  asteroid possibly can, without actually doing so,”  according to The Washington Post. Astronomers  say that XE54 was small enough that most of it  would have burned up in the atmosphere but  Space.com noted that the fact that it was not  spotted until it was basically upon us is a  ”troubling sign.”

It is estimated that there are over 4,000 Near  Earth Objects (NEOs), which are big enough to  take out a chunk of land the size of a state, that  routinely pass close to the Earth, of which only  30% have been identified.

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