would it really be like if an asteroid or a meteor hit the earth joining me now to discuss is geoff chester he's from the u.s. navy observatory there jeff hello thank you for our for joining me so let's talk about all this media hype that was surrounded by this asteroid that just passed by how close was it really to earth well it didn't hit us that's the good news it passed within about seventeen thousand miles of the surface of the earth that's actually inside the belt of geostationary communications satellites which really your programs around the world. so in terms of how close it was it was pretty close now the point is though that it did miss the big thing about this particular asteroid is that it is the largest one of its size caliber to come this close since we've been observing the heavens now we have only been able to observe objects of this size and predict their paths within perhaps the last twenty years so we have. an inventory of several thousand of these objects whose orbital paths we know we know when they're going to come close to us and so on and so forth but we don't know