I have learned that this is the day the earth just might get clobbered and, if you are like my mother who loves to worry about stuff, the “all clear” bell won’t ring until about 5:30 this afternoon. Until then, we’ve got a little bit of an asteroid problem because two “minor planets” are zooming particularly close to earth today.

I hardly want to send people running amok in their backyards like a chilling 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ famous novel “The War of the Worlds” did, giving some of our forefathers a bit of apoplexy, but just last Sunday our NASA telescopes picked up not one but two asteroids zooming towards our globe.

At 5:51 this morning the first, which has been named “2010 RX30” by our scientists, was supposed to miss (if you are reading this, it did) and then at 5:12 p.m. the second minor planet, which has been tagged “2010 RF12,” is scheduled to “get close.”

The reason you haven’t heard the air-raid sirens is that RX 30, which is estimated to be between 32 and 65 feet in size, was on a track where it was believed to pass us with about 154,000 miles to spare and this afternoon’s mysterious mass, which is about 20 to 46 feet in size, is believed to pass 49,088 miles outside of the old strike zone.

That’s right, the two asteroids are both supposed to miss earth by healthy distances, but scientists are excited over the fact Wednesday’s pair will pass within 0.6 and 0.2 lunar distances, respectively. And NASA’s Donald Yeomans, who manages the space agency’s Near-Earth Program, told CNN the asteroids demonstrate a need for closer monitoring of the minor planets that could slam into us and create a real “War of the Worlds.”

The Near-Earth Program, which first spotted today’s asteroids with powerful telescopes at the Catalina Sky Survey headquarters in Arizona, keeps a close eye on potentially threatening comets and asteroids that enter what is called “near Earth space.” For the record, that’s within a 28 million-mile radius of you and me, and when they talk about “lunar distance,” that’s science-slang for “from here to the moon.”

Yeomans told CNN that “near Earth space” is pretty exciting to monitor, explaining 50 million objects are flying around every day, but to have two asteroids come this close on the same day is noteworthy. "Things like this happen every day that we simply don’t know about because we don’t have the telescopes large enough to find them or surveys that are looking full-time," he told reporters.

"This demonstrates the system's working on some level, but we need larger telescopes and more of them to find objects that are coming this close,” he said, further explaining that while there is a low probability of us getting hit with a global disaster, scientists agree that there is “a problem” in outer space.

"We have only recently appreciated how many of these objects are in near Earth's space and (it's) best that we keep track of them and find them," he said. "I think this is Mother Nature's way of firing a shot over the bow and warning Earth-based astronomers that we have a lot of work to do."

Well, by then it sounded like the good scientist was hyping job-security, but the lingering question is what would happen if we got hit by a mad asteroid. Both of today’s asteroids are miniscule so my guess is that we’d find them stuck in some farmer’s field or they’d scare a school of fish somewhere.

According to tracking devices, RX30 was believed to come closest to the north Pacific and RF12 somewhere over Antarctica, but you wonder what would happen if a serious planet came zooming out of the galaxy. I guess you’d watch it through a telescope until it got close enough to see with a naked eye and then – whamo – we’d all turn into little asteroids.

In the meanwhile, I love to tell my mother that we have a couple of minor planets getting awfully close today because it is just something else to keep her blood pressure up. I mean, can you imagine what people who like to worry will do when they learn an asteroid is actually coming within 0.2 in lunar distance this afternoon?

I’ll tell you this: Dr. Phil will give way to the Trinity Network at our house.

royexum@aol.com