Skip to main content  Asteroid '13: If Earth Was the Size of a
Basketball...  By Andy Cox Published Feb 18 2013 04:44 PM EST
People have a hard time comprehending the size of things we
don't encounter in everyday life. These days someone is more
likely to compare the size of something to an iPad than to a
breadbox, but we still can't often grasp the magnitude of the
distance from the Earth to the Sun or the radius of a hydrogen
atom. It often helps to put things into a scale that we can
better understand.  For example, the asteroid 2012 DA14 will
make a close encounter Friday (Feb. 15 around 2:24 p.m. EST)
with Earth. There is no risk of the asteroid impacting Earth,
but it's difficult to visualize exactly how big it is and how
close it will come. NASA has published images showing 2012 DA14
passing within the "geosynchronous ring," but that's still a
concept foreign to most. These kinds of images also often
unintentionally misrepresent the relative sizes of the objects
in question because of the vast scale d