State tracks asteroid on close shave.(Evening)

Byline: Sue Vorenberg svorenberg@abqtrib.com / 823-3678

The sky isn't falling, but a piece of it nearly hit Earth a short while ago.

A pair of White Sands telescopes tracked an asteroid's close encounter with the Earth last week. The garage-sized rock came within 4,000 miles of Earth the closest asteroid pass yet seen by any telescope.

We mere earthlings shouldn't panic at that thought, though, because such objects are reasonably common flying by once every few months and usually burn up in the atmosphere, said Grant Stokes, associate head of the Aerospace Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.

"The previous …