A comet is passing extremely close to Mars
C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is an Oort cloud comet discovered in
January 2013 by the Siding Spring Observatory. Subsequent analysis by NASA's
NEO Program indicated that it could pass just 31,000 miles (50,000 km) from the
Red Planet's surface: only two-and-a-half times the distance of its outermost
moon, Deimos, and roughly the height at which communication satellites orbit
Earth.* If the comet were to collide with Mars, it
was estimated that a blast equivalent to a billion megatons of TNT would be
produced, similar in scale to the impact which drove the dinosaurs extinct.
Reference
http://news.yahoo.com/slight-chance-comet-could-hit-mars-2014-nasa-215439619.html
Accessed 7th March 2013.
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