Will It Be An 80,000 Mile Miss?

The Asteroid, according to "experts" won't hit Earth, but it will make its closest approach at 7:45 a.m. EST (1245 GMT) when it comes within 80,000 miles (130,000 km) of our planet on Wednesday. That's nearly one-third the distance between the Earth and the moon.

What makes 2010 AL30 odd is its orbit, which is almost exactly one Earth year long, leading to some discussion that it might be a man-made spacecraft launched in the recent past.

But Chodas said the asteroid's trajectory is not the kind used to transfer spacecraft out of Earth's orbit, nor is the space rock followed by other objects that escaped from Earth or lunar space. The asteroid was also far from Earth during the Apollo lunar missions of the late 1960s and 1970s, when many spacecraft were launched into the space near the moon, Chodas said.

Okay someone has to ask this question. What if it is space junk from some other planet? Wouldn't that be fucking cool. Since we will never know, unless of course it were to crash into earth, we can only imagine and speculate.

2010 AL30 will appear as bright as a 14th magnitude star and pass through the constellations Orion, Taurus and Pisces as it passes the Earth. Magnitude is a standard used by astronomers to measure the brightness of objects in the sky. The lower the number, the brighter the object, with the brightest stars in the sky categorized as either a zero or first magnitude.

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