You could get into orbit around it by traveling at jogging speed, and might even escape its gravity entirely with a good jump. If you were walking on the surface and you tripped and fell, it’d take you a minute to hit the ground. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Unfortunately Fortunately, it’s in a fairly stable circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter, so it’s unlikely to hit the Earth any time soon.Ĥ942 Munroe (!!!) is large enough that it would have noticeable gravity, although not much. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. That’s comparable in size to the one that killed the dinosaurs-definitely big enough to cause a mass extinction! The talented author worked with NASA as a roboticist before retiring to start his webcomic. Munroe is also the creator of XKCD, math, language, romance, and sarcasm webcomic, and author of a book by the same name. I was excited to learn that, based on its albedo (brightness), it’s probably about 6-10 kilometers in diameter. Randall Munroe Randall Munroe is a graphic novel and comics writer best known for his debut novel What If. The first thing I did was try to figure out whether 4942 Munroe was big enough to pose a threat to Earth. I spent all weekend telling everyone who wanted to listen (and probably some who didn’t) about the asteroid.

They submitted my name for asteroid (4942) 1987 DU6, and it was subsequently renamed 4942 Munroe. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. Munroe was born in Easton, Pennsylvania and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. There’s an asteroid named after me!Īmazing xkcd readers Lewis Hulbert and Jordan Zhu noticed that the International Astronomical Union-the organization in charge of official astronomical naming-was taking suggestions for what to name small Solar System objects. XKCD Already Showed Me How To Do It (Score: 5, Funny) Reader 1: We need a good story made from book titles to get him to visit our city. Randall Munroe is the author of the popular webcomic xkcd and the science question-and-answer blog What If.

Xkcd author