Travelers In The Night

Recently my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Greg Leonard discovered, 2016 WJ1, a relatively large asteroid which can come close but will not hit the Earth. The extremely unlikely scenario of an impactor with our number on it would start the with the report of a fast moving point of light in the night sky. After a few days of data the Minor Planet Center would give it a name. Tracking the new asteroid, asteroid hunters would be alarmed as the chances that this object will impact the Earth starts to rise. Large telescopes would then be trained on it to obtain the pattern of colors in the light it reflects and use this information to determine its size, mass, and chemical composition. Hopefully this fictional impact would be far enough in the future so that humans could mount a space mission to intercept it and deflect it so that it would miss Earth. Even when a collision with this mythical object is certain, scientists would not be able to accurately predict its point of impact on the surface without additional tr