The 'Lost' Asteroid That Might Hit Earth
Welcome to the Department of Celestial Asset Tracking, where near-Earth objects exist in a superposition of “catalogued and harmless” and “unpleasant surprise” until someone points a telescope at them long enough to collapse the waveform. In this examination of humanity’s cosmic inventory management, we explore our ongoing efforts to find, track, and occasionally lose fifty-four-million-ton rocks hurtling through our neighborhood at eighty-eight thousand kilometers per hour.
Our quantum-coherent correspondent guides us through Darren Holloway’s futile campaign to secure budget approval for asteroid monitoring, the Square-Haired Boss’s confident assertion that “if we can’t see it, it’s not our problem,” and the uncomfortable reality that we’ve identified eighty-nine potential impact windows for an asteroid we haven’t actually seen since 2007. Meanwhile, the real science of planetary defense has evolved from scattered observations and hopeful guesses to a global network of telescopes capable of spotting a two-meter rock hours before it becomes a fireball over France—though we’re still working on finding the city-killers before they find us.
Cosmic Inventory Warning: This episode contains advanced concepts such as “one-point-two days of observation,” “eighty-nine potential impact scenarios,” and “one in eleven-point-five million odds that somehow aren’t reassuring.” Listeners may experience side effects including sudden awareness that we’ve only catalogued forty percent of the hundred-forty-meter asteroids, inappropriate questions about departmental budget priorities, and the overwhelming urge to check the Sentry Risk Table (results may vary; existential dread not included).
From Floppy Disks to Fireballs: The Mathematics of Losing Things in Space
The story of 2007 FT3 begins, as these things often do, with a brief observation window and a very long list of uncertainties. In 2007, astronomers spotted an asteroid approximately three hundred fourteen meters across—large enough to devastate a region fifty miles wide if it ever decided to visit. They tracked it for exactly one-point-two days, gathering fourteen data points across twenty-nine hours, before it faded below the detection threshold and disappeared into the cosmic filing system.
Those observations were enough to calculate an approximate orbit: a long, elliptical path swinging from inside Venus’s orbit out past Mars, completing one trip around the sun every three-point-one years. But one-point-two days of tracking leaves enormous uncertainty—a fuzzy cone of possibility stretching millions of miles into the future. When astronomers projected that orbit forward, the cone intersected Earth’s position eighty-nine different times over the coming decades. October 2013. October 2019. October 2024. March 2030. Each date represents not a prediction but a window—a moment when Earth will pass through that cone of uncertainty, and if the asteroid happens to be in that same spot at that same moment, we have a problem.
The probability of impact on any given date? Approximately one in eleven-point-five million. The energy release if it did impact? Equivalent to two-point-six billion tons of TNT. This is the uncomfortable mathematics of planetary defense: vanishingly small odds multiplied by civilization-altering consequences, producing a number that’s impossible to ignore but difficult to act upon.
The Uncertainty Principle of Planetary Defense: Here’s the counterintuitive part: we know when 2007 FT3 might hit, but not if it will hit. The potential impact dates aren’t predictions—they’re windows where Earth passes through the asteroid’s uncertainty cone. We can’t simply point a telescope at it and check, because we don’t know exactly where “it” is anymore. The object is too small and too dark to spot at a distance. We’d essentially have to wait for it to come close enough to Earth to reflect enough sunlight to see—which rather defeats the purpose of early warning. The asteroid isn’t missing in the traditional sense. We know it exists. We have an approximate orbit. We just cannot currently see it, cannot refine its trajectory, and won’t know for certain whether it’s dangerous until it either impacts Earth or sails safely past. It remains, in the technical parlance, “not our problem”—until it suddenly becomes everyone’s problem.
From Same-Day Surprises to Global Detection: The Evolution of Watching the Sky
The 2007 FT3 situation would be concerning enough on its own, but it’s far from unique. The catalog of near-Earth objects contains thousands of asteroids with incomplete orbital data—objects spotted once or twice and then lost in the darkness. And occasionally, the problem works in reverse: asteroids we’ve never seen at all arrive with virtually no warning.
On July 25th, 2019, an asteroid designated 2019 OK passed within forty-five thousand miles of Earth—less than one-fifth the distance to the Moon. It was somewhere between fifty-seven and one hundred thirty meters across, large enough to devastate a major metropolitan area. It was discovered the same day it flew by. The same day. The object had actually been photographed weeks earlier by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, appearing in images on June 28th and July 7th. But 2019 OK was approaching almost head-on, moving directly toward Earth, drifting so slowly against the background stars that automated detection software didn’t flag it as a moving object. It sat in the archive, unrecognized, like a warning letter filed in the spam folder.
This wasn’t a failure of technology—it was a limitation of geometry. The same trajectory that made 2019 OK dangerous was exactly what made it invisible. One NASA scientist, reviewing the incident, wondered aloud: “How many times has this situation happened without the asteroid being discovered at all?”
The good news is that we’ve gotten dramatically better. In 1998, NASA could track perhaps ten percent of large near-Earth asteroids. Today, we’ve catalogued approximately ninety-seven percent of kilometer-scale objects—the true planet-killers—and none pose any threat for the next century. The ATLAS system, fully operational since 2022, became the first survey capable of scanning the entire dark sky every twenty-four hours. NEOWISE, before its mission ended in 2024, observed more than forty-four thousand solar system objects. And NEO Surveyor, launching in 2027, will finally address our biggest blind spot: asteroids approaching from the direction of the sun.
The Maturity of Planetary Defense: The progress is real and measurable. In March 2022, asteroid 2022 EB5 was discovered just two hours before it struck Earth’s atmosphere over Iceland—only the fifth asteroid in human history observed in space before impact. In February 2023, asteroid 2023 CX1 was spotted seven hours before it disintegrated over Normandy, France, and meteorites were actually recovered. These were small objects, too small to cause damage, but finding them at all represents a revolution in detection capability. We’ve gone from “asteroids occasionally surprise us” to “we can tell you which city to watch for the fireball.” And in September 2022, NASA’s DART mission successfully changed an asteroid’s orbit by deliberately crashing into it—proof that if we find a threatening object years in advance, we can actually do something about it. For the first time in four-point-six billion years, a species exists on Earth that can see the cosmic bullet coming and, potentially, step out of the way. The catch, of course, is that we have to see it first.
From Budget Requests to Background Noise: The Philosophy of Cosmic Vigilance
The uncomfortable truth about planetary defense is that it requires sustained investment in a problem that might never materialize—at least not in any given budget cycle. We’ve found forty percent of the hundred-forty-meter asteroids. At current detection rates, finishing that survey would take another thirty years. NEO Surveyor should accelerate that timeline dramatically, but it requires funding, maintenance, and the continued attention of institutions that tend to prioritize immediate concerns over existential ones.
Meanwhile, 2007 FT3 continues its silent orbit. Seventeen years of circling the sun, unobserved since those twenty-nine hours in 2007. The potential impact dates keep ticking by—2013, nothing; 2019, nothing; October 2024, nothing. Each time, the asteroid either missed Earth entirely or simply wasn’t where the models suggested it might be. The uncertainty remains. The cone of possibility remains. And until we reacquire the object and refine its orbit, it remains officially classified as a statistical abstraction—a series of probabilities rather than a concrete threat.
This is perhaps the strangest aspect of planetary defense: learning to take seriously a danger that exists primarily as mathematics. The asteroid is real. The potential impacts are real. But the risk exists in a liminal space between “definitely happening” and “probably not”—a superposition that can only be collapsed by more observation, more data, more telescope time pointed at the right patch of sky at the right moment.
The Cosmic Performance Review: Somewhere out there, 2007 FT3 completes another orbit, indifferent to budget cycles and probability calculations. The universe doesn’t grade on a curve, doesn’t accept deadline extensions, and doesn’t care whether the Department of Celestial Asset Tracking has adequate staffing. But for the first time in Earth’s history, someone is watching—imperfectly, incompletely, but watching nonetheless. The detection systems improve each year. The catalog grows. The blind spots shrink. And perhaps that’s the most honest assessment of where we stand: we’ve started paying attention, we’ve proven we can act if needed, and we’re slowly, steadily getting better at the cosmic inventory management that our planet’s continued existence requires. The asteroid may or may not be coming. But at least now, we’re looking.
Join us for this journey through humanity’s ongoing efforts to track the cosmic inventory, where Darren from Celestial Asset Tracking wages a lonely campaign against bureaucratic indifference, the Square-Haired Boss insists that one-in-eleven-point-five-million odds mean it’s not in the budget, and the real science of asteroid detection reveals both how far we’ve come and how much work remains. Because in the realm of planetary defense, sometimes the most important discovery is that we finally started watching—and that somewhere in the vastness of space, the objects we’ve lost are still out there, patiently waiting to be found.