Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

It’s like it’s trying so hard to hit us and it just can’t do it

All I can imagine is every astronomer drinking heavily from 2002-2003 like “There it goes–OH FUCK IT’S COMING BACK”

Thanks moon <3

Moon: YEET

The moon threw it away yay moon

the moon was having none  of it

The best part about this? They took a picture (read: spectrographic analysis) of the thing and found out it wasn’t an asteroid at all. It was a piece of a Saturn V rocket, discarded in space decades ago and set into an orbit around the sun. That’s right, this motherfucker spent 30 years orbiting the sun, waiting for a chance to have its revenge on the petty humans who abandoned it in the void.

So that weirdly common Star Trek trope in which one of our space probes comes back to fuck us up turned out to be true

If you click through to the article, it also says that they believe it has a 40-year interim between heliocentric orbit (orbiting the sun) and geocentric orbit (orbit the Earth)

Which means sometime in the 2040’s, it’s likely coming back.

“Next time I won’t miss”