Asteroid Called “The Beast” To Sideswipe Earth, Big Enough To Destroy An Entire City

Boy, that would leave a mark …

Luke 21:10-11, 27, “Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven… And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.’”

By Mike Wall, Space.com – “Humanity should be thankful ‘The Beast’ doesn’t have Earth in its crosshairs.

This Sunday (June 8), the near-Earth asteroid 2014 HQ124 — which some observers have nicknamed ‘The Beast’ — will give the planet a relatively close shave, coming within 777,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers) at its closest approach, or about 3.25 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

There is no chance of an impact on this pass, researchers stress. But at 1,100 feet (335 meters) wide, 2014 HQ124 could do some serious damage if it slammed into us.

‘This one would definitely be catastrophic if it hit the Earth,’ asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said Thursday (June 5) during a webcast produced by the online Slooh community observatory that previewed 2014 HQ124’s upcoming flyby.

‘If it hit a city, it would definitely wipe out an entire metropolitan area,’ Boslough added.

Asteroid 2014 HQ124 is currently traveling about 31,000 mph (50,000 km/h) relative to Earth, Boslough said. But if the asteroid were on a collision course, our planet’s gravity would boost its speed up to about 40,000 mph (64,000 km/h) at the time of impact.

If 2014 HQ124 is one solid piece of rock — its composition isn’t known for certain — the strike would unleash an explosion with a yield of about 2,000 megatons, Boslough added. For comparison, the atomic bomb the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II packed about 15 kilotons. (One megaton is equivalent to 1,000 kilotons.)

‘You’d end up with a crater about 3 miles across,’ Boslough added. ‘An event like that would break windows over 100 kilometers away.’

Asteroid 2014 HQ124 was discovered on April 23, just six weeks ago — not nearly enough time to deflect the asteroid if it were on a collision course with Earth.” Read more.