A near-miss asteroid has the Twitterverse wondering: Just how close will it come to hitting Earth? Designated “2011 MD,” the space rock was first detected on June 22 by LINEAR—MIT’s Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research center—and will miss the planet by just 7,500 miles.
The asteroid is believed to be between 8 and 18 meters, about the size of a small house, and will next approach us in 2022. But even if our orbits intersect, it’s likely to explode in our upper atmosphere, doing relatively little damage.
