Last year, news outlets measured a passing asteroid in borzoi dogs. Tail to snout, they reported: about twenty-three of them. We enjoyed it as much as anyone. Then we went back to watching the things that do not fly past.
The asteroid was real and the coverage was, technically, accurate. 2023 EZ is a roughly 34-meter rock that swung past Earth at a comfortable six million kilometers, give or take. That is about sixteen times farther away than the Moon. It was never a threat, which is exactly why a respectable outlet could afford to measure it in Russian hunting dogs.
- Object: Asteroid 2023 EZ
- Size: about 34 m (or, per the internet, ~23 borzois)
- Closest approach: about 6,000,000 km (~16 lunar distances)
- Impact risk: None
- Source: NASA JPL, Center for Near-Earth Object Studies
The thing that does not miss
Here is the part the size-comparison headlines tend to skip. The asteroid was always going to miss. The objects that will not miss, eventually, are already up there, and we put them there ourselves.
More than 34,000 tracked objects are circling Earth right now, alongside an estimated 140 million fragments too small to track. They travel at roughly 7.5 kilometers per second, and unlike 2023 EZ, they have nowhere else to be. Asteroids are the headline. Orbital debris is the standing problem, and it is the one Space Waste was built to work on.
So measure the asteroids in whatever animals you like. We will keep our eyes on the junk that stays.
Open the live debris tracker →Sources: NASA CNEOS · The Jerusalem Post