英闻天下——283 An Asteroid Misses Earth, Causes No Public Panic

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　　The asteroid, named 2012 DA14 came closer to earth than many communication and weather satellites.

 

　　Scientists have been monitoring its movement all year round. Jim Green is Planetary Science Division Director at the American space agency NASA.

 

　　"We are safe. DA14, we call it, was discovered last year. We've been monitoring its movement all throughout the solar system."

 

　　Green said NASA was currently monitoring more than nine-thousand asteroids², of which scientists believe 1,800 are reasonably large.

 

　　The 2012 DA14 asteroid was too small to see with the naked eye even at its closest approach over the Indian Ocean near Sumatra.

 

　　The best viewing locations, with binoculars³ and telescopes, were in Asia, Australia and Eastern Europe.

 

　　Daniel Hestroffer, an astronomer⁴ at the Paris Observatory⁵, said it is not necessary to worry about large asteroids having disastrous⁶ collision with earth in the near future.

 

　　"For the larger one, now we start to be more confident, to predict almost all for the very big ones, and we have been able to predict that there will be no catastrophic collision with the earth for the next century. But for the intermediary sized ones, we still need to work hard on it."

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