17 thousand miles. That's how close an asteroid came to earth earlier Friday.
Physicists say "DA-14", mathematically speaking anyway, was nothing to sweat about. Nothing like the exploding fireball that smashed into Russia earlier Friday morning.
Friday afternoon, the asteroid known as 2012 DA-14, which is 150 feet wide and half the size of a football field, passed awfully close to earth. If you want to know what the odds are of something actually happening, you're talking numbers and equations, Radford University Physicist Rhett Herman is your man. "It happens everyday, said Herman, "in fact you go out in the nighttime sky when it's dark you look up, at least once every ten minutes as long as you don't blink you will see one of these things going through the atmosphere."
Astronomers say Friday's "near earth" asteroid is another reason why more research is needed to track these space rocks.
