Yay! We’re doomed!

Here’s pretty much the sort of orbit diagram you don’t want to see:

In case it’s not obvious, this shows Earth and the asteroid 2009 DD45 so close together that they cannot be distinguished. Astronomically speaking, this is Close.

From arksky.org, there’s this:

An exciting very close pass of a Near Earth Asteroid for observers in the northern
hemisphere awaits Monday and Tuesday nights; NEO 2009 DD45 will skim within 0.0003 AU of
the earth during the early evening hours of March 1 (2nd UT) and will attain a brightness
of at least mag. 10.8, perhaps brighter.This object is moving incredibly fast, so charts and preparations will be necessary to
even keep up with it telescopically as it moves rapidly north and east each hour.

…

the asteroid is assumed to be about 60 meters across, so it is a small one; the close pass will be between 28,000 and 48,000 miles from earth early on Monday, but the asteroid will still be very, very close and bright by Monday evening when it gets dark. The orbit parameters have not been changed since the original confirmation was announced, so as far as a close point to earth, that is difficult. Although this is classed as an “Intruder”, there is very little chance of earth impact this time.

Unless the measurements are off by an unbelievable amount, the asteroid will miss us tonight. And even if it did hit, at 60 meters diameter it’d be a relatively minor hit… according to the Earth Impact Effects Program, if a 60-meter chunk of iron hit the Earth at 17 km/sec, the kinetic energy would be the equivalent of about 31 megatons. Enough to wipe out a city, to be sure; crater would be on the order of a mile in size. Basically, this:

As an odd aside: I decided to look up Meteor Crater on Google Maps, linked here. Oddly, the surrounding areas are available at high resolution… but the crater istelf? Crap resolution. Why would the crater be effectively censored???