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Apocalypse Missed: Asteroid Near Miss
Erik Hovland writes: "The NEAT project at JPL found a nice big rock (about half a km). And it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss. Still one of the closest encounters yet, glad someone is playing chicken little for us.Full story here." The chunk of rock has been dubbed 2000 QW7, and was spotted last weekend because of its speed and brightness. But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up.
So I am suggesting the Moon Unit, the distance from the earth to the moon. In this context, the asteroid passes about 12.19 Moon Units from Earth, and the sun is 384.6154 Moon Units away.
Point being, some people panic when you say 0.0317 AU, but would probably be more relaxed if you said 12.19 MU (Moon Units).
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given that the Moon is actually moving *away* from us.
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Peter
Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
Oh, don't apologize. It's not rain we're worried about falling from the sky...
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
Yup. Just the fact that we've seen this NEO (and a couple hundred other 1km rocks) pretty much means we can tell it's not going to hit us any time soon. Some of us worry about the thousands (based on the limited searches we've done and the density we've found there) of kilometer-sized earth-crossing asteroids we haven't seen, though. Not to mention the tens of thousands of "city killer" sized NEOs that are theoretically out there, but that we can't easily track.
Hollywood got it wrong repeatedly; if we were to get hit by an asteroid, not only would it not have to be "Texas sized" to wipe us out or kill thousands, it wouldn't even necessarily be detected. We've had asteroids pass within a million miles of Earth, but only be detected *after* they went by.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs
But we have. We had a "city killer" hit in Siberia last century, for example. God only knows what has hit the oceans or similarly unpopulated areas when nobody was watching.
what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
Conservatively, about 1 in 2 million that we'll see a mass extinction sized event in my lifetime; about 1 in 20 that we'll see a "city killer" hit a moderately populated area in my lifetime. There are "in between" events to consider too, but that gives you the basic idea. Even wildly speculating, I'd guess no higher than a 10% chance that I'll see either. But when you consider that the damage from a nicely aimed city-killer could reach $10e12, and the damage from a multi-kilometer rock would be (from our point of view) infinite, the situation is still a little worrisome.
How big does a rock have to be to get through earth's atomosphere? Obviously this will depenend of the composition of the meteor and where it lands, etc... but how big are we talking ballpark for something on the scale of say, a small nuke blast?
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Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So what else could be used? Light? Well, OK, but what about low albedo (sp, sorry) objects? Use something like lidar? (Laser radar.) Again, low light reflection dictates high detection power.
If we could detect mass somehow, that would be the way to go, but we can only detect mass at a distance by observing how it affects other mass as it passes.
Well, radiation (and this means more than radioactive, it includes light, radar, ect.) would mean very high output power and very sensitive recievers, with long dwell time for speed of light delays.
Any thoughts?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
> Today's hasty cosmic visitor -- known by researchers as 2000 QW7 --
> was discovered just last weekend on August 26, 2000
This makes me wonder what sort of realistic contingency plan we have for reacting to such a thing within a week, if this is all the advanced notice we are going to get. And no, I don't count seeing Armageddon as adequate preparation.
With all this talk about a Missile Defense program which is almost completely pointles s, I'd be more interested in a asteroid defense system.
On a side note, with all the treaties against space based nukes, has any country ever tested a nuke in a vacuum? Maybe that would ignite our atmosphere and in a Twilight Zonian twist, the asteroid wouldn't hit the earth and we would have been destroyed by our own ignorance. Or not. Depends who is writing it and who is producing.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Hate to break it to you.. but that "face" upon closer inspection turned out to be a more natural random formation of rocks that look nothing like a face.
The human brain has a very large section specifically for perceiving faces. It hunts for faces in the visual field, and will spot them in virtually any pattern that vuagely suggests a face. It also attempts to identify identity, emotion, and a number of other factors.
So everywhere we look we see faces - in light sockets, on the lids of cans of grated parmesan cheese, and in the shadows of topographic features on Mars.
One description of this effect, and an interesting exercise utilizing it, occurs in the book "understanding comics" by Scott McCloud. The exercise:
- Draw a random squiggly closed curve. (Think "amoeba".) It looks like a random squiggly closed curve.
- Add an "eye" composed of a small circle with a dot in its center, somewhere inside the closed curve (preferably near an edge). Now it looks like a "comic book" head.
As for Mars: Shortly after the "Face on Mars" flap started NASA published another photograph from the same probe, which had found a feature that might as well have been a deliberate sculpture of Kermit the Frog.
IMHO there is enough interest in the "Face" site (both by believers and debunkers) that NASA should spend a little of a probe's time to re-image it, and publish a radar topographic probe and reflectivity map.
Plug that into some existing software and you could do a virtual flyby and walkthrough of the site. You could set the viewpoint and illumination to replicate the original image (to see that it was the right spot), then wander over and around it, illuminating it from other angles, to see what it's really like.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
they move in the night sky because THE PLANET ROTATES.
And so do all the sagans-and-sagans of "fixed stars". So how do you differentiate the incoming object from J. Random Ordinary Nova?
If you're VERY LUCKY you spot it while it's still far enough out that the orbital mechanics makes it appear to move slightly relative to the stellar background. But when it's far out it's a lot dimmer, looking like the rest of the asteroidal junkpile. It doesn't take a very big rock to create an extinction event.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the ? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
AARGH! Hit the wrong button. Let's try again...
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the NEAT project? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss.
I disagree with the characterization of 3% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun as a "close call". I'd save it for things that come a LOT closer - like the big one that passed inside the orbit of the Moon in the last decade or so.
But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us
But they DID tell us last time they had one where the preliminary figures put the Earth inside the uncertainty boundary of the initial orbital calculations. ("They" in this case was a researcher, not NASA administrators {who didn't even know about the object yet}.)
It caused a flap, and maybe the researchers won't be so quick to talk to the press NEXT time. But once an object is spotted a call goes out to astronomers all over the world for possible previous spottings, to refine the orbit. That's a big audience (and includes lots of amateur comet spotters). Once the numbers are out anybody with the tools can crunch their own confirmation and/or look at the object in the sky and make their own measurements. So I wouldn't sweat being kept in the dark.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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The new national missile defense will protect us from these stupid rocks. NMD is the answer - it will shoot lasers and blow up the rocks, thereby providing alternative entertainment for those bored of the regular TV sitcoms.
w/m
"As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up."
Script suggestion for *Armageddon II: Liv Lives*; Scene !!!, Liv and NASA Geek in her dressing room just before flight.
"Liv, can I zip you up? Please?"
"Umm, no, you little geeky pervert. You and that puny little Perl script you have the nerve to call an application can get the hell out of my dressing room. Don't even *think* about *applying* that thing to me."
"No, don't worry I've already seen them in that topless scene you did in *Stealing Beauty*. I'm not trying to cop a peek or feel, I just want to help you save the world from that asteroid through whatever highly unlikely and unscientific methods those hack screenwriters have dreamt up without consulting technical experts who didn't get their degrees from Joe Bob's College of Astrophysics and Auto-Repair."
"Oh. Okay, then, zip me up."
"Wow, your lips are so much more beautiful and soft-looking in person. They're just like Julia Roberts' lips, only on an *attractive* face."
"Oh my God, is that a slide rule in your pocket or...ohh, we have to bring you with us! Maybe the sight of your enormous..."T-square"...will scare the asteroid away into a more elliptical orbit! Or at the very least our all-female crew can ravage you in a desperate attempt to cover up for poor screenwriting by depicting lots and lots of gratuitous sex!"
"But what about Bruce Willis, he's part of your crew too?"
"Well, he gets to ravage you too. It's in his contract."
"Umm, err...okay, you're worth taking it in the ass from a deranged scientologist foolish enough to divorce Demi Moore's breasts. I mean, Demi Moore."
[Kissing and groping]
"So, you like my lips, NASA geek. Everyone does. It's the one thing I got from my Dad--well, that and Alicia Silverstone; we used to share her on alternate Thursdays."
"Oh no....that's right you're...Steven Tyler's daughter! I forgot! Oh, my God, I can't look at those luscious lips without thinking about your dad. Oh no, it's like kissing Aerosmith! Acchhh, I'm going to be sick! I feel like I just made out with Aerosmith...gross..blechh....barf [much vomiting. NASA geek exits stage left, leaving a trail of vomit and shouting "Nooooo, I just made out with Aerosmith! Yuck!]
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Do you mean "What are the chances of us getting hit with a rock that will end all life on the planet if not the planet itself"? Then the answer is non-zero.
We shouldn't overstate the liklihood, but we should not understate the consequences of that unlikeliness. After all, the dinosaurs did become extinct because they didn't have a space program (Sagan, I believe).
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Let's just call it a 'Zappa'...abbreviated as 'Z'. the Moon is 1 Z away from the Earth. :)
We all know how much of an "expert" Kaku is about catastrophes as he predicted that Cassini would bring about the end of the world.
Imagine if it eventually got tired of being 0.0026 AU and decided to come closer. Hrmmm... I wonder if we have any special telescopes continually observing the moon.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The Earth is a lovely and more or less placid place. Things change, but slowly. We can lead a full life and never personally encounter a natural disaster more violent than a storm. And so we become complacent, relaxed, unconcerned. But in the history of Nature, the record is clear. Worlds have been devastated. Even we humans have achieved the dubious technical distinction of being able to make our own disasters, both intentional and inadvertent. On the landscapes of other planets where the records of the past have been preserved, there is abundant evidence of major catastrophes. It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million, Even on the earth, even in our own century, bizarre natural events have occurred.
In the early morning hours of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, a giant fireball was seen moving rapidly across the sky. Where it touched the horizon, an enormous explosion took place. It levelled some 2,000 square kilometres of forest and burned thousands of trees in a flash fire near the impact site. It produced an atmospheric shock wave that twice circle the earth. For two days afterwards, there was so much fine dust in the atmosphere that one could read a newspaper at night by scattered light in the streets of London, 10,000 Kilometre's away.
-- Carl Sagan, Chapter IV "Heaven and Hell", Cosmos (ISBN: 0-349-10703-3)
Corner cubes are funky to play with. If you look at one with one eye closed, your pupil will always appear exactly at the corner no matter how you twirl the thing around.
I agree, but how do you educate the public about an impact with a rock that will turn the air to fire, possibly fracture or obliterate the planet and cause our home to become as sterile as a Backstreet Boys liner note without inciting fear?
I understand what you're saying - we don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot about this (like we did once already) - but public funding sucks. I don't see how you bring this to people's attention w/out being accused of the Chicken Little/Cassandra complex.
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- A.P.
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(Disclaimer: these numbers should be taken within a fudge factor of 10!)
;-)
10! = 3628800
I'm sure you can be more accurate than that
Woz
Kardashev Level 1 - civilizations using the entire power output of a planet
Kardashev Level 2 - civilizations using the entire power output of a star
Kardashev Level 3 - civilizations using the entire power output of a galaxy
Our own civilization is still somewhere under the K1 level. Getting to K2 would require something along the lines of a "Dyson sphere" to collect the energy output from the Sun, especially that above and below the plane of the ecliptic (which is currently radiated away from anything in the solar system which could use it).
Oddly, Kardashev did not extend his analysis beyond galactic scale. Perhaps he thought that getting to K3 level would be a big enough challenge :-).
Relating the Kardashev scale to Kaku's scale...a K1 civilization would probably be somewhere between 0 and 1 on the Kaku scale. K2 civilizations would probably be between 1 and 2, and K3 civilizations would probably score between 2 and 3. So there's a good correlation. (I agree, a civilization that scored 4 or 5 on the Kaku scale would probably be so far beyond our comprehension that it would be impossible for a mere 21st-century human to comprehend...)
Eric
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Be who you are...and be it in style!
Its nothing new to most people that a catastrophic impact is just a matter of time. Tomorrow, next year, whatever. And if its not a meteor or asteroid, it could very well be a large volcano, etc. Regardless, the survival of our species will be threatened.
I highly recommend Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace". In this book Kaku describes a very real and valid method by which we can classify a civilization based on its understanding of physics, even though we have no data points besides our own. This understanding of physics will have a direct result on how any civilization utilizes energy in surviving a variety of inevitable crisis.
This is from memory, so it could be totally wrong. But, you'll get the idea:
0. Level Zero. This civilization depends on natural energy deposits in its environment. It is unable to survive a large scale disaster, despite any technical or artistic accomplishments it has achieved.
1. Level One. This civilization is able to harness true sources of energy production on a large scale, as opposed to only harnessing local energy reserves. The only true source of energy in the universe is fusion. This could be in reactors, or in some clever harnessing of a star. A level one civilization will be able to utilize and direct enough energy to survive a planetary disaster. This could be by diverting the disaster, or by relocating enough resources to a safe area of a solar system and rebuilding.
2. Level Two. This civilization can utilize and produce enough energy to survive a solar system disaster. This could be a massive solar flare, death of a star, or destruction of the solar system by interstellar collision between neighboring stars, supernova, etc. Survival of such a disaster would imply the ability to manipulate a planet or star, or the ability to move about a group of solar systems with relative ease. Planetary engineering and terraforming would be taught in the freshman physics lab class.
3. Level Three. A black hole is sucking up half the galaxy? No problem, these guys will move to the other side of the galaxy, or, maybe they would move the black hole to a safer place.
4. Level Four. All the resources used up in the galaxy? No problem, we'll go find more useful galaxies to plunder. Traveling about the universe would be no problem.
5. Level Five. The universe has existed for so long that protons are starting to decay. The universe is coming to an end - either in the big crunch - a repeat of the big bang, or the big chill - matter in the universe expands to the point of oblivion, kinda like a fart in a wind tunnel. A level 5 civilization would step into a different universe, or would engineer their own.
From our perspective, a level 5 or 4 civilization would look like the Kingdom of God. We probably wouldn't comprehend it.
A level 3 civilization would be something like Isaac Asimov described in his Foundation Trilogy.
A level 2 civilization would be like Star Trek or Star Wars.
A level 1 civilization would be like the early episodes of Star Trek.
A level 0 civilization would be like the dinosaurs that used to roam the earth, and its current inhabitants of strangely naked apes, otherwise known as humans. We're not even close to being level 1. Our economies are so dependent upon oil that its sad, and we have no idea whats going on in our own solar neighborhood. We're trying though. With any luck we'll get to level one before mother nature or our own stupidity does us in.
-Neandertal
Probability of hitting earth for an asteroid closer within the .0317 AU range: (Re = radius of earth, Ra = radius of asteroid)
pi*Re^2
------- = one chance in 560,000
pi*Ra^2
Though it's not likely a certain asteroid hits earth, with about 50 such asteroids every year, let's expect the earth to be hit by this kind of (large) asteroids about every 10,000 years! That's quite often compared to the age of the earth.
(Disclaimer: these numbers should be taken within a fudge factor of 10!)
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If you want to get a feel for the probabilities, you might want to read Rain of Iron and Ice by John S. Lewis. A section of the book gives the results of multiple computer simulations of the chances of the Earth being struck by various size objects as fictionalized descriptions of the results. Many large objects can hit the ocean without being noticed, except by any sailors unlucky enough to be in the area.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Of course, this only works if you can find lots of people crazy enough to pay $1000 to get an asteroid named after them. But just think: you could get your name on the doomsday asteroid!
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And they measure that distance continuously. It used to be true that the Earth-Moon distance was known with better precision than the distance between London and New York, in fact.
I don't know if that makes me feel more secure, though, at least we can see the asteroids coming, but our understanding of mantle dynamics isn't up to predicting Deccan Traps style volcanic events yet...
I have written over 900 book reviews
And besides, it was worth it to get to a quote in the epiloge: "A meteor hit a parked car in New York City -- what else was it going to hit?"
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Uh, Tim...if anything Liv Tyler did some suiting down in that movie.
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Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
I remember a segment on Space (Canada's Scifi network) where they put two balls on a field and started hitting tenis balls between them, with a baseball bat. Chunks of rocks, even HUGE chunks of rocks are very small in comparison to even the distance between the earth and moon.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
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On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Gravitational nudges by Earth, Mars or Jupiter can potentially set such asteroids on a collision course with our planet, says Yeomans.
That's the last straw. It's for precisely this reason that we as a nation (needn't be specified -- you know who we are) must fulfill our manifest destiny and blow Mars and Jupiter up off the face of the earth. I don't care whether we have to blow them into a billion little asteroid-sized pieces, and I don't care that Jupiter is primarily gaseous in character. We defeated the British, the Mexicans, and the Vietnamese, er, umm, I mean the Evil Soviet Empire, so the least we should be able to do is destroy two unsuspecting and poorly defended planets.
Just think of all the money we'll save by not having to fund manned missions to explore what will no longer exist!
I think I saw that movie...
:)
Good thing this is just Slashdot, so it isn't real or anything...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Plug for the Summer Science Program: I was there in 1998, and I think it's quite a cool program. We (about 35 high school students) tracked known asteroids using a medium-sized telescope, developed photographic plates in a darkroom, and wrote C/C++ programs to determine the orbits of our asteroids based on the data we had collected. Oh yeah, and we visited JPL. Hint: go right before taking calculus and physics, so you can slack off for a semester when you get back to school
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Spacebob has a quick review of this book here.
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The shareholder is always right.
No one should worry about being struck, personally, by a comet or asteroid. The threat to an average person from disease, car accidents, accidents in the home, and from other natural disasters is much higher...
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This really isn't a near anything... It's a huge miss.. Don't get paranoid...
The only thing preventing rocks from pounding earth into dust is chance..
Space is big... The Hitch Hikers guide to the galacy had it right....
Earth is a really tiny target...
Now to get worryed... that is ALL that protects us...
That and we have NASA...
(Hay Rob Limo want help your buddys at NASA when it comes to justifying NASAs budget? Tell em about near misses we keep having and how NASA may be all we have if we ever get something that is NOT a near miss.. we can nuke it if we know about it... thats were Nasa comes in)
Ohhh maybe thats where the Mars landers went... they weren't landers.. they were bombs sent off to blow up asteroids heading into earth... We were never told..
Anyway... don't get complacent... but don't get paranoid...
Random chance is what keeps us from going splat...
and that is like security by obscurity...
It slows down.. it limits.. it dose not prevent...
We are ok... relax...
If a real rock comes... then break out the nukes...
I'm thinking something like the bunker buster we develuped for the Golf War and a nuke... then we plow the missle into the heart of that larg rock and smash it to partical dust...
I don't actually exist.
If it had been on a collision course we wouldn't have had enough time to do anything about it.
Asteroids on a true collision course don't appear to move in the sky; they just get larger. This makes them harder to detect than one which moves relative to the background of stars. An asteroid on a true collision course might not even be recognized as a threat until it was way too late to do anything. It is the punch you don't see that gets you.
Our moon is 3476 km in diameter and is constantly 0.0026 AU from the Earth.