Kicker: City killers

NICK EICHER, HOST: The year was 2013, a man in Russia pointed a camera at an odd-looking trail of smoke in the sky.

AUDIO: [Sound of explosion]

A 65-foot meteor traveling at about 40,000 mph broke apart and the shockwave shattered glass, rocked buildings, and injured about 1,000 people.

That was a meteor. Asteroids are much bigger and last week, one that was somewhere between three and six times the size of the one that landed in Siberia whizzed by Earth.

Here’s how close: Think about it this way. Our moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. This asteroid passed us by at about 45,000 miles. In space terms, that’s closer than a brush-back pitch on the inside corner.

And in all seriousness, astronomers call these asteroids “city killers.” The energy released would be about 30 times as devastating as the Hiroshima atom bomb. 

The super-sciency name of the asteroid was 2019 OK. I say we name it Psalm 121. We read, “the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.”

It’s The World and Everything in It.

(Photo/Wikipedia)

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