Travelers In The Night

Recently my NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey teammate Carson Fuls discovered an approaching asteroid about the same size as the one whose high altitude disintegration injured nearly 1500 people in Chelyabinsk Russia in February of 2013.  Fortunately this new one missed planet Earth.  There is more good news.  Carson spotted this small space rock about 40 hours before its closest approach to planet Earth.  This means that if it had been on a collision path with our home planet we would have had time to warn people to seek shelter before it created a potentially destructive sonic boom in our atmosphere.