- Note - This huge asteroid was only discovered
6 and 1/2 weeks before passing by the Earth. Only 6 and 1/2 weeks...
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- At midnight on Monday, August 10, this
year the world came just SIX hours from being obliterated as a giant asteroid
hurtled towards us at 50,000 miles per hour.
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- The Sunday People can today reveal that
a mile-wide space rock missed us by just one million miles.
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- In cosmic terms it was a second away
from being hit by a juggernaut.
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- If it hadn't veered in a slightly different
direction it would have:
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- - KILLED a quarter of the population.
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- - DESTROYED all animals and crops after
blotting out the sun.
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- - CREATED a tidal wave an astonishing
17 miles high - Concorde only reaches 10.5 miles.
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- - DEVASTATED just about everything for
2,000 miles around.
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- The asteroid - the speed of which was
the equivalent of travelling from London to New York in 21 seconds - would
have made the rest of the world appear like the aftermath of a global nuclear
war.
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- Only people with access to underground
nuclear bunkers would have had any chance of survival. The asteroid is
the biggest in recorded history to have come so close to the Earth - a
chilling echo of the Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster movie Armageddon in which
Bruce Willis saves the world.
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- The cataclysmic near miss was only known
to a select group of scientists. This is why the terrifying information
has never been made public until now.
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- It only came to light through research
by amateur astronomer and Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik.
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- He is calling on the Government to spend
£9.5 million on a giant telescope which would track objects from
space which are on a collision course with Earth.
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- Mr Opik, MP for Montgomeryshire, is also
campaigning for a network of six telescopes around the world to monitor
objects heading towards us.
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- He said: "Once every 100,000 years
something big hits Earth and once every hundred years a 50-metre one does
- causing an explosion 5,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
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- "We live in the roulette wheel of
the cosmos - never knowing when a big one might hit us."
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- The asteroid was first spotted by astronomers
in New Mexico on June 24.
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- They flashed a warning to observatories
world-wide - including the one in Armagh, Northern Ireland, which tracks
objects that might hit Earth.
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- It was the Irish astronomers who worked
out that the asteroid would miss us by six hours.
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- Armagh astronomer Dr John Chambers said:
"It would have gone straight through the ocean and hit the rock underneath,
throwing up not just a gigantic tidal wave but a huge amount of dust."
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- But he added: "While we were safe
from this one there could well be another on its way."
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- The next asteroid scientists know about
is the ten-mile wide Toutatis - due to come within 13 hours of Earth on
September 29, 2004.
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