Never Saw It Coming

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On March 2, 2009 an asteroid the size of a football field flew past Earth close enough to scare the pants off anybody who was paying attention. If it had hit, the impact would have created a blast equivalent to the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Amateur astronomers worldwide were disappointed. Not because they wanted to witness the impact, although a few undoubtedly did, but because the asteroid had been discovered two days before its passage, yet word hadn’t gotten out in time for anyone to set up their telescopes and look at it. Worse, they learned after the fact; the news had been deliberately suppressed so it wouldn’t cause a panic, even after the few astronomers who knew about it had calculated its orbit and confirmed it would miss the Earth.

When Craig Hendrickson learned about that, he set up the Near Earth Asteroid Reporting Database, or NEARD. People laughed at the acronym, but that didn’t bother him. As long as the right people used it—and yes, most of those people were nerds—then he would be happy.

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