Editorial: Asteroids: Hunting space rocks

"It" lurks out there, a huge space rock that could be hurtling at the Earth.Now the thought of a killer asteroid slamming into our teeming and fractious planet has in recent years been a beloved topic of end-of-days conspiracy theorists and movie makers, but in our everyday mundane world, most of us probably figure someone is watching and the problem-is-handled.But even the most sanguine of our species may have been unnerved Friday when space came calling.One visitor was expected; the other rudely crashed our earthly party.Scientists quickly said there was no connection between the meteor that hit Russia and the asteroid that missed Earth. Of course, that's how conspiracies work, right?And it hardly matters after Friday, when the 49-foot-wide meteor exploded in a burst of light and streaked across the sky over the Ural mountains in Russia followed by the Earth-passing journey of the 150-foot asteroid 2012 DA14. The asteroid traveled south to north -- a different direction than Russia's exploding fireball. 2012 DA14 was barely seen Friday as it passed some 17,100 miles from Earth.xinjiang tourchina tour operatorsNot to minimize what happened in Russia, where more than 1,000 people were injured, or the fright felt by many at the prospect of DA14 obliterating a section of the planet, but all this puts last week's cruise ship story in perspective, doesn't it? Why worry about the stock market, or drug needles,Silk road tours or desal, when the end is nigh?More seriously, Friday's dramatic events are a reminder we live in a solar system where millions of rock-and-metal asteroids are circulating.kashgar border transfer Some are small, only a few feet across, while the largest, Ceres, is the size of Texas.When an asteroid, or a comet, enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's a meteor. They carry a frightful punch. Friday's meteor, roughly the size of a bus and considered tiny in the asteroid lineup, was estimated to be 20 times more powerful than the World War II atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Meteors have hit before -- the impact of a huge asteroid hitting Earth seems to be widely accepted for killing off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- and they'll hit again.But guess what? Friday's meteor was not picked up by observers -- and even if it had been, probably little could have been done. And 2012 DA14, three times the Russian meteor's size, wasn't picked up until a year ago by astronomers -- too late to knock it off track. Fewer than 1 percent of the up to 1 million asteroids similar to DA14 in size, or bigger, and trajectory, have been observed.Eating right at home is fairly fast but sticking to healthy cheap Novelty Multiuse Keychain manufacturers while you're around a business trip in many cases can be a little trickier.