The Daily Mail reports:
A small asteroid struck the Earth above Iceland last Friday — just two hours after it was spotted by an astronomer.
The space rock, named 2022 EB5, is believed to have mostly burnt up in our planet’s atmosphere, but even if it had impacted the surface it would have done little to no damage because it was just 10ft (3 metres) wide, about half the size of a giraffe.
It was about the what now? Since when, exactly, did we measure asteroids in giraffes? I’m no astronomer, but “a giraffe” seems to be an extremely odd way of measuring any item that is not, in fact, a giraffe.
Back in 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because, as the Los Angeles Times reported it, “spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched.” One can only imagine how much worse this problem would have been had zoo animals been the standard. “Sorry, sir. It was an elementary mistake, really. The Florida lab uses alligators, but here in Maryland we’re still measuring with crabs, and so, when the orbiter finally got into position, it ended up hitting the atmosphere at the wrong angle by between two-thirds and three-quarters of a lemur.”