Asteroid's Near Miss With Earth
BALDWIN: They're calling it a close shave, a 125-foot wide asteroid passing within 140,000 miles of earth, and the frightening thing, NASA only spotted it hurdling towards us two days before it zipped between our planet and the moon. Chad Myers, here with me now, to talk about this darn close asteroid. How did they miss this?</s>CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: There are a lot of them up there that we don't know about and this is going to happen a lot. We're going to see these things zipping by our earth and let's just hope they don't collide because --</s>BALDWIN: We talk about when they're coming, but I guess you're right. There are so many.</s>MYERS: They're bigger than school buses. What we had today, 125-feet wide, that would have hit the earth, would have put a hole somewhere about 800 miles across. Knocking down all the trees, doing an awful lot of damage, something much, much bigger, put the dinosaurs out of work.</s>BALDWIN: Out of business.</s>MYERS: Out of business and so we're going to see these things flying by. I have a graphic, though, that shows you the ones we actually know.</s>BALDWIN: There is one coming in February, right? It's even bigger?</s>MYERS: Right. It is o.nly going to be 8.9 lunar distances away, like 20,000 miles away. That's about the width of a little bit more than the width of the earth away. That's really close. Let's hope it doesn't veer off or, you know, a couple hundred feet. This is a big deal. I don't like these. We need Bruce Willis. Where is he?</s>BALDWIN: Tell me about the meteor showers for tomorrow.</s>MYERS: You bet, great meteor shower, almost 120 of these per hour. So that would be good. You got to be away from the city lights and all that. This is going to be a nice meteor shower.</s>BALDWIN: What are those pictures from?</s>MYERS: Those are from the old shower coming in a little bit, from last year, a couple of years ago, and it was a very good show. As you run through these belts, sometimes it is a good year, sometimes it is a bad year, this looks like it could be a very good night for us tomorrow night.</s>BALDWIN: Think about living in the city.</s>MYERS: These are little, not going to affect us. These are going to make shooting stars.</s>BALDWIN: OK, pretty sky.</s>MYERS: Not holes.</s>BALDWIN: Chad Myers, thank you very much.