Da 14 News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The speed of these things just a few millimeters a second, just a few millimeters. so if you can find it, say, ten years in advance before it was going to cross the earth's orbit when we are there, then you would just give it a little nudge. the planetary society made the grant to the astronomers in spain who found asteroid 2012 da 14. so it's a niche business of finding these fast moving, relatively small objects. still tremendous destructive power. anyway, what we want to do is get these spacecraft with silver panels that would pump lasers and shoot the lasers at the rock and inject the stuf...

Can i get guidance from the control room? >> yes, it is, let's listen. >> 46 it cannot hit. its orbit is known so accurately we can project through most of the 21st century and right now looking at the possibility, very tiny possibility that it could hit the earth in the year 2080. i expect that will go away and know we're safe from this asteroid for a long time. >> how would you use the information that matt was talking about. the information that the radar can give us. >> lance's information is helpful in computing the orbit. we will have essentially nailed the orbit of this, one of the best...

The scary news is, the 130,000 metric ton astroid called da-14 is the size of half a football field, and it will be much closer than the moon. in fact, it will thread the needle between earth and the roughly 600 satellites around us. the ones that your cell phone relies on, possibly even smashing one on its way by. but if that's why you're thinking this is a long way from all of us way down here walking the streets, you may want to think again. the last close call turned out to be a direct hit. it was 1908, and luckily it hit the middle of nowhere, siberia, decimating 1,000 miles of trees but ...

Its closest approach. >> jim, is there any which these two things are related, what happened in russia and what we just saw? >> well, we've taken a good look at the one that happened over russia about 12 or 13 hours ago and that particular one is coming into a completely different trajectory. da-14 game from south to north. it appears that this one was more north to south and because those orbits are so very different, we believe they're completely unrelated events. >> megyn: that's just incredible. for the average lay person sitting at home. it's hard to believe. you don't get this event ever...

Extremely close encounter with earth. the space rocks, what is it going to do? trace gallagher is monitoring it. >> before we think that that's going to handle it, no worries, the only reason that we know about this? pure luck. a dentist in spain spotted the asteroid on his high powered telescope and he told various space agencies around the world and nasa started following it. 2012 da 14. and 27 miles within the earth in about an hour and like seven minutes, like 2:24 eastern time and this here that you're seeing, this is it. this is from one of the high powered telescopes that nasa has and c...