Now for the Near-Earth Asteroid (as if there hasn't been enough excitement for one week!)

You’ve probably heard by now that a small near-Earth asteroid – named DA14 by astronomers – will be passing incredibly close, within 17,200 miles from Earth this Friday, February 15.  While this proximity to the Earth brings DA14 inside the orbit of the moon and closer than some high-orbiting communications satellites, it will not strike Earth. That’s a good thing, because at 45 meters across with a mass of 130,000 metric tons, it would not destroy the Earth if it hit us, but it could definitely level a city. For a while there, astronomers were considering the remote possibility that this same asteroid would strike us in 2020, but that possibility has also been ruled out. Nothing is going to happen when DA14 passes, and you won’t even be able to see it with the naked eye, so don’t bother going outside for this one. Experienced observers with telescopes or binoculars (and really great star charts) might be able to spot it, but your best bet for experiencing this “close encounter” will be to watch it online, in real time, at one of these two sites (check them out for online observation of other events, too):

• Clay Center Observatory will offer real-time HD video, weather permitting, on February 15, from 6 pm EST to 4 am the next morning. The video feed can be freely accessed worldwide via Clay Center Observatory’s Ustream channel. The observatory has also set up a countdown clock to show how much time remains until the tracking begins.
• Slooh Space Camera is also tracking the asteroid. Visit Slooh’s event page for information about the DA14 online event.

One of the more interesting things about DA14 is that its orbit is similar to that of Earth, which is one of the reasons astronomers only discovered this asteroid for the first time last year. Moreover, although the possibility of a strike this year and in 2020 has been ruled out, this asteroid's orbit continues to be studied, so there still exists a remote possibility (one chance in 83,000 according to NASA) that DA14 and the Earth could collide between this year and 2020. (See EarthSky for details.)