Dismissive Journalistic Report of near-earth objects

So, the “tour bus sized” asteroid that zipped by earth on September 24, 2020 and missed us by 13,000 miles was dismissed in the paper as no big deal. Let’s look at that little old rock. The kinetic energy of a moving object is defined as ½ mass times velocity squared (1/2M times V squared). If the bus was 50 feet by 8 by 8, it had a volume of about 100 cubic meters (100M cubed). The mass of rock is about 3,000 kilograms per cubic meter (3,000Kg/cubic meter) that’s 300,000 kilograms for our “bus rock”. The velocity of sun orbiting asteroids varies but 15 kilometers per second (15,000 meters per second) is a good guess (15,000 KM/SEC). The exact velocity of this object is known so this calculation can be corrected if necessary. Multiplying ½ M times V squared we get about 3.4 X 10 to the 13th power (lottsa zeros) joules of energy. The bomb that the USA dropped on Hiroshima, Japan contained about 8 X 10 to the 13th joules. So, had this little rock hit Earth, it would be “only half of an atomic bomb”. Where it hits is kind of important. One smallish Abomb isn’t a big worry, but imagine if it had hit North Korea; what do you think wing nut extraordinaire, Kim Jung Un would have done?