On Saturday, August 30, 2016, astronomers discovered a new asteroid near Earth, just a few hours…

…before it almost hit us.

Update: July 25, 2017

NASA announced June 22, 2017, that they were closing the Asteroid Redirect Program, less than a year after it was announced.  Now, this is truly bizarre.  From SkyandTelescope.com:

“After years of study, NASA announced recently that its plan to retrieve an asteroid and place it in lunar orbit, known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), will be shut down due to lack of congressional support in the proposed FY2018 budget. The NASA ARM program director Michele Gates made the announcement on June 13th, during the recent meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group held at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The focus will now turn to shutting down the program while salvaging key technologies and lessons learned for other possible future applications.”

Night sky with stars and moon and clouds. (Credit: NASA)

I KNEW IT.  After ‘years of study’, but they just told us about it last year?  And they could certainly have found room in the NASA budget, if they took out some of their CGI-created nonsense they pass off as Hubble telescope videos, etc. to keep a program going that is potentially going to save the planet.  If there was such an urgency last year, why would it suddenly be deemed not worth continuing by the US government?  And blaming the Trump administration, like they don’t care to protect the planet?  This smells like a set-up to me.  Now, if we do get hit with something, who is going to take the blame – after all, NASA alone was ordered by a President to be watching the skies to protect us from anything coming our way.

One thing is sure – if something does come this way, we aren’t going to be told about it until it is probably too late to react.  They don’t want society to devolve, people to stop paying their bills, quit their jobs, etc. because of some upcoming event.

But the real shocker – It was announced at the same time, that both houses of Congress were encouraging the current funding for NASA’s Asteroid Redirection Mission be abandoned, and the money be used instead for a return to the Moon. I personally have spent an incredible amount of time going over documents, testimonies from the astronauts, and I cannot believe they are going to try to pass this one off on us AGAIN...because we never went to the moon in the first place.

Nobody at NASA seems to have any answer for many questions about the moon landing, questions I have detailed in a new posting – The Moon Landing Myths.

Congress says another Moon mission would serve as a stepping stone toward exploring the asteroid belt found beyond Earth and then the exploration of Mars. But a Moon mission would use all the money currently being saved for the Mars mission, and many feel that a Moon mission might just be a consolation prize.

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) says there is no better proving ground for NASA technologies than the Moon, with the goal of sending humans to Mars by mid-2030. Honda is only one of the U.S. congressmen actively applying pressure to focus on the Moon rather than Mars. The Moon mission would be much more budget-friendly, and Congress has not been receptive to funding the Mars mission.

More fake videos with fake astronauts on a sound stage.  I can’t wait.

On August 28, 2016, Earth almost came face-to-face with an asteroid named 2016 QA2, which missed us by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon.  That puts it at only three times farther away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it coming.

So how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit. It’s highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging out by either Mars or Venus, but rarely ends up near Earth.

As Space.com reports:

The newfound asteroid 2016 QA2 zoomed within 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) or so of the planet Sunday. For perspective, the moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 239,000 miles (384,600 km).

Astronomers think 2016 QA2 is between 80 and 180 feet (25 to 55 meters) wide. That means the space rock is slightly bigger than the object that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, injuring more than 1,200 people. [emphasis mine]

But another, more worrying reason is that there aren’t a lot of people looking for potentially dangerous asteroids. While Congress has tasked NASA with finding 90 percent of asteroids 450 feet or larger by 2020, the agency is nowhere close to that goal. Funding for asteroid detection is very low, and most telescopes that could detect asteroids of this size won’t come online for a few more years.

And even if NASA was on track to meet that goal, they still would have missed 2016 QA2, which is only about 50-100 feet. Asteroids of this size are so small that there’s almost nothing we can do to detect them. And they can still cause a lot of damage, as the Chelyabinsk asteroid confirmed.

Which therefore made the announcement by NASA in June 2016 even more unnerving:  The formation of an “Asteroid Redirect Mission”.  Picture the movie Armageddon – come to life.  From their site:

Graphic showing what the Asteroid Redirect Mission could be like.

“NASA is developing a first-ever robotic mission to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface, and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Once it’s there, astronauts will explore it and return with samples in the 2020s. This Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is part of NASA’s plan to advance the new technologies and spaceflight experience needed for a human mission to the Martian system in the 2030s.”

Here is what I find unnerving about this – NASA announced this like it was just another day at the beach.  They are basically telling us that such a need exists.  It has either not existed before, or it is intensified today – or there is an actual threat, already predetermined, that they have not told us about.  Or even more bizarre and unthinkable – they have already done trials or an actual rescue has already been launched.  NASA never announces anything that is not advantageous for them to announce when they do – in other words, if they didn’t want us to know about this for some reason of agenda, we would never have heard about it.

By NASA Nonsense, Founding Partner
Calling Out Community
Posted August 28, 2016.  Updated July 26, 2017.

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