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Space Object May Be Killer - In 2030
Somewhere in the chorus, Bandwidth_ writes: "Time to start stockpiling those beans and working on your Y2K shelter again. Astronomers have confirmed that object 2000 SG344 has a 500-to-1 chance of hitting earth in the year 2030, a much higher probability of impact than any object before it. Scientists aren't certain what it is, but it's most likely a tiny asteroid or it could be a leftover Apollo rocket booster. It is not a major threat, damage would be contained to a localized area in the 1 to 3 megaton range if a collision were to ever happen." As jamie points out, this probably ought not worry you unduly, but it is the first nonzero-rated object on the Torino scale.
N2UX points to an MSNBC article on the object which points out that the threat has now been downgraded to a more comforting level.
Taking into account new precovery data of the object taken by the Catalina Sky Survey on 17 May 1999 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/ K00 /K00V15.html), the NEODys team has
calculated that the 2030 impact scenario is no longer real (see http://ne wto n.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?objects:2000SG 344;main .)
As a result of the new data, there has been a dramatic improvement in the orbital uncertainty. In fact, the nominal miss distance for this object is now given as 0.0346 AU on 22 September 2000 (22.89 UT22.19). What this means is that the object will come no closer to the Earth in 2030 than 3 million miles! In other words, the claim that this object may hit the Earth in 2030 has now been completely ruled out - less than 34 hours after the IAU and NASA decided to announce a "significant impact risk" to the world.
It was unwise of the IAU and NASA to rely on the 1999 one-night stand data by the LINEAR team. The IAU/NASA impact announcement was premature and alarmist.
(Thanks to B. J. Peiser for the above.)
You have an interesting theory there, however, I have a few questions:
1.) How exactly would microwaving an asteroid help us?
2.) Where would you get a microwave oven that large?
3.) I was not aware that piss was alive, and if it is, why would I want to celebrate?
4.) Why do you want to blow an asteroid? Granted, it's a sexual deviancy that probably hasn't been tried before, but sheesh! What next? "Alt.pictures.erotica.blowjobs.asteroid"?
5.) Who's Nuff and why should we pay attention to what he said?
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
My browser just ping-pongs between two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to load a page.
<plug> click here: http://slashdot.org/article. pl? sid=00/11/02/1639247 -- my first accepted slashdot story. Too bad it's old news and didn't make the front page. :-) <plug>
> ...damage would be contained to a localized
> area in the 1 to 3 megaton range if a collision
> were to ever happen.
Seems odd to measure the "localized area" in "Megatons".
Appears to be yet another sample of that new "goals 2000" english the White House is so proud of.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
While the new orbital calculations have ruled out the 2030 event, they have also increased the likelihood of encounters in years after 2030....
:-) If the object collided with Earth in 2030, the chance of encounters after 2030 would have been zero. By not hitting Earth in 2030, the likelihood of encounters after 2030 have increased from zero to something greater than zero...
Well, duh!
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics"
"One day after sounding an alert, astronomers said additional data had eliminated any chance that a recently discovered space object would collide with Earth in 2030. The revised forecast shows the object passing no closer than 3 million miles. "We're still watching it, but the 2030 event is not a concern anymore."
News changes quickly these day, eh?
George!
an MSNBC article on the object (...) points out that the threat has now been downgraded to a more comforting level.
It's a good thing we can trust them to tell the truth; after all, Big Brother would certainly consider it worth the risk of causing a huge panic by telling us the truth if they really did think we were in potential danger...right?
- HunterZ
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
After being kidnapped by aliens, they kicked him out after a lot of whiskey and too many renditions of Heartbreak Hotel.
While the new orbital calculations have ruled out the 2030 event, they have also increased the likelihood of encounters in years after 2030....
The media attention was due to an early announcement; NASA is no longer saying that there is any chance in 2030. There is, however, a 1-in-1000 chance in 2071.
Please click links in stories before posting.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
according to a news story on bbc on-line, this is alarmist, and the object will miss Earth in 2030.
d _1006000/1006305.stm
The link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
The story:
Astronomers say reports that the Earth would be struck by a small asteroid in 2030 were wildly exaggerated.
Less than a day after sounding the alert about asteroid 2000SG344 a revised analysis of its orbit says it will in fact miss the Earth by three million miles.
Astronomers are still watching the object, which was discovered in September and thought to be a mile (0.6 km) across.
Some scientists have criticised the way the information was released before it had been thoroughly confirmed.
Threat rating
Asteroid 2000SG344 was the first object to have a threat rating of greater than zero on the 0-10 Torino scale of threatening object from space.
It was discovered on 29 September by astronomers David Tholen
and Robert Whiteley using the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6-metre
telescope on the island of Hawaii.
Shortly thereafter, pre-discovery observations taken in May 1999
by the Linear sky survey were also identified.
On Friday the International Astronomical Union issued an alert
saying that the object had about a 1 in 500 chance of striking the
Earth on 21 September 2030.
No object has ever been rated with so high a chance of impact.
Had it struck our planet the results would have been devastating, an
explosion greater than the most powerful nuclear weapon.
Sky survey data
After the announcement astronomers began looking at sky survey
data to see if the object had been picked up but not recognised in
earlier observations.
It was found and its past position allowed a more accurate
calculation of its orbit to be made.
The result: in 2030 it will miss us by three million miles, or 12 times
further away than the Moon.
The new orbit reveals a slight risk of a collision with the Earth about
2071 but it is thought that when the orbit is better known that risk
will disappear as well.
Currently asteroid 2000SG344 is about nine million miles (15 million
km) away and getting more distant.
'Premature and alarmist'
Because 2000SG344 is in a similar orbit to the Earth it has been
suggested that it might be an old Saturn upper stage rocket of the
type that was used in the early Apollo moon missions.
If it is man-made and did strike earth the effects would be very local
and limited.
Some scientists have criticised the IAU and Nasa for releasing
warnings about the asteroid only for them to be rescinded less than
a day later.
Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University said it was
"extremely unwise" of them and the warning was premature and
alarmist.
I expect it from the local newspaper and tabloids who have nothing better to write about. But I don't want to have "THEE WORLDE WILL ENDE!" thrust into my face on /. of all places.
We're all sensible enough to realise that if there were the remotest chance of it happening, the world would club together and nuke/laser/persuade it off course as necessary. And anyway, I'd put the likelihood of the world being ripped apart in a Nuclear war before 2030 at more than 500/1 anyway.
We're more than sensible enough to know when the media is just spinning to fill column inches. There's enough to talk about without this.
Fross
What if the technique misfires, and brings the asteroid on a much more disastrous course than it is now? Like, a 30% chance of a collision in 2010 ?
so does this mean that we have to
send a team of redneck oil drillers
up into space, and nuke the object
from the inside?
as long as we get to leave Bruce
Willis up there to die, i'm all for
it.
. at my signal -- unleash hell .
Actually, I think they're slightly different. An "N in M" probibility means that the probability p of that event occurring is given by p = N/M . Here, N specifies the relative number of outcomes that represent the event under consideration, and M represents the relative number of total number of possible outcomes.
In contrast, "M to N" means that if you performed M + N trials, one event would occur M times and the other would occur N times. Here, M and N represent the relative number of outcomes of two distinct events, with no statement made about the total number of possible outcomes. Often, the number associated with N is the event in question, and the "other event" is merely "the event associated with N didn't occur." In that case, the probability p that the event associated with N occurs is given by p = N / (N + M) .
So, by this argument, 1-in-2 odds is equivalent to 1-to-1 odds. The idea is that the first nomenclature specifies the likelihood of a single event compared to the total of all events, and the second nomenclature specifies the likelihood of one event relative to another event. Got that?
At any rate, with a 1-in-500 chance, the difference between 1-in-500 and 500-to-1 is negligible.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
I'm no expert, but as I understand it the recent Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests were picked up on seismographs thousands of kilometres away. If that is the case, a megaton impact would be picked up by seismographs, and the media would *certainly* be interested. Heck, the asteroid scares that have been publicised attract plenty of media attention, why wouldn't a real collision?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...because if George W. gets elected, he's big oil, and we can have him send Bruce Willis and his leatherneck oil riggers up there to drop a nuke in it and kick its ass. Failing that, we'll find a bunch of old geezers who know how to take apart that there Apollo booster. Mebbe we can get John Glenn up there--he's old enough to remember how all this crap works.
Failing all that, though, "Surf's up, dude!"
TOTKChief, who can't view Armageddon without screaming, "You bloody fscking idiots, you can't throttle a solid rocket like that, and you damn sure can't re-light the bastard!"
--
-- Geof F. Morris
If you get your hands on released US Nilitary documents from years past, they track, and document 3 - 5 major collisions every decade! Major, megaton impacts aren't a once every few thousand years issue, they happen about every 3 - 4 years. Just bear in mind they are most likely to impact near polar regions, and there is a SHITLOAD of empty space on this planet, so no one ever seems to notice.
hell, events such as the Tunguska blast are predicted to happen every 200 years or so.... some people just need to stop watching those disaster movies. Should I mention that New York City sits on a pressure slip quake fault that triggers every 250 years or so..... and the last recorded quake in NYC was about 245 years ago, and the experts say it was like a 9.3 on the richtor scale..... Or would that cause a massive media hype as well......
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The Torino Scale, as presented in the link provided in the story, is useless. It tries to rank objects on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the damage they would inflict if an impact did occur, yet it simultaneously tries to rank based on the likelihood of collision, though these factors aren't necessarily correlated at all.
Basically, an object gets a 0 if it is extremely unlikely to hit the Earth and|or wouldn't inflict any damage if it did. An object gets an 8, 9, or 10 if it's certain to hit the Earth, and|or would inflict continental or global devistation.
The Torino scale doesn't give a way to categorize objects which are certain to strike the Earth but pose no danger, nor does it facilitate ranking objects that could prove catacalysmic, but have only a marginal likelyhood of impact.
Looks like something more suited to a bad asteriod movie than a NASA research site.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
You can see that none of the objects in the table has a period of 353 or 354 days. Perhaps an object with a longer period got slowed, or one with a shorter period got accelerated, by Earth-Moon approaches. Or Apollo 12's lost stage ended up here...
Maybe we could ask the Martians for their space defense technology. They seem to be pretty good at shooting down all those NASA probles we sent them !
My fellow geeks:
Now is the time to play the "Only if you were the last man on earth" card.
Go for it!
You might get lucky.
It should be noted that the Torino scale is the probability of a 1970's Ford Gran Torino
station wagon being propelled into low Earth orbit, if the impact were to occur.
--K
Hey. It had to be said.
---
Try this one:
Object 1999 AN10 will slip by Earth on Aug. 7, 2027 at about 7 AM GMT at a distance of 0.002652 astronomical units - about 246 521 miles. Check it out for yourself at this page.
The Moon is about 246 000 miles away.
In astronomical terms, that's a bullet passing five millimeters above your head.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Predcition of where it would land depends on how accurately they know its orbit, obviously. There are two factors. First is the position factor: where exactly will the object be when it impacts? Second is the time factor. Since the earth turns, knowing the exact time of impact is necessary for knowing precisely where on the planet the impact will occur.
As to what location would do the most damage, it depends on how big the object is. A small object (like this one) will obviously do the most damage if it hits a city. If it lands in the ocean, unless it's fairly close to a city, it won't be noticeable. However, a really large object is just the opposite. If it hits a city, it could wipe out everything within, I dunno, ten or a hundred miles. If it hits the ocean, the tidal wave could destroy everything on the coasts for thousands of miles.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
And no V'ger jokes? WTF? This is /. isn't it?
From the article:
But no-one knows exactly how many undiscovered asteroids are out there.
Way to go Mr. Wizard.
And By friday precovery data showed that the object wasn't going to hit....
Of course... because precovery data exists then it may be a sign that this isn't a man made object.
Hmmm.
500-1 odds that a 32 bit clock will be good enough. I'm comfortable enough with that to cut back the 64-bit conversion budget.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, Ok. I'll volunteer to go up in the space shuttle, drill a hole in this thing and blow it apart. There are, however, a couple of conditions:
1. I want the new Athlon 5.5 GHz with 1.2M RAM
2. I want the new 8 TB optical HD. (no Zoltrix)
3. Someone has to pay my $2400/month Napster fee
4. I don't want to pay anymore taxes.
5. Hookers.
6. Split up Microsoft.
Deal?
I AM groo
That said, you would expect the more precise analysis to be something like "miss by 15 earth radii" or "miss by 27 Earth radii". But no! The latest verdict is "miss by 11 lunar distances". This is a miss by 660 Earth radii. This is waaaaaay out of the initial error bars. The initial error bars were wrong.
When the actual answer lies outside of your error bars you need to be shot. Especially when your analysis is to be published in 5 million newspapers. I don't want to hear about any other prediction from this guy again. </rant>
I always get 1 in 500 and 500-to-1 confused. Just to clarify: 500-to-1 is the one where we're screwed, right?
How can an Apollo rocket booster cause the same
damage as a multi-megaton explosion? Even Skylab didn't cause any damage when it fell.
Ok, so where do I sign up for the crack "Missile Defense" geek squad?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
We need to send an unprepared group of lunatics up there to destroy it :)
give them a nuke, but no detonation counter...
javajawa# sleep
Meh
Nobody answered about an asteroid collision. Now one seems to be coming, are they going to look stupid? Well, no. When was the last time a candidate thought more than 5 years ahead? We need a system where longer term planning becomes neccesary.
Funny, when I was growing up, I was told the world would end at 6:28:15 AM on February 6, 2040....
As I grew older, though, the powers that be extended the deadline to 29940, so we're OK.
(Mac developers will understand.)
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Okay, so this doesn't mean we forget about it. It means we have a 71 year warning that something is coming -- and a 30 year warning that we have a chance to get a close look at it. Or a 30 year warning of the closest approach if we have to put equipment on it to tinker with its orbit.
Let's give Steve Jobs a reason to say that Apple has saved Mankind? Isn't his head big enough as it is?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
This begs to bring up the topic once more of whether we should build an international space defense system. Of course, we should be able to pick things out 20-30 years beforehand, but still - what if we caught something less than a year beforehand?
The initial piece in "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke posed this type of question, and he posed a rather interesting possible solution.
Hopefully, we can prevent ourselves from going the way of the Dinosaurs - or those shitty movies that were made in the last few years.
- passion
With all this talk about the possibility of Extinction Event Asteroids and stuff, why not take a poke at some of these smaller asteroids/debris to try out techniques that could spin-off into something that might actually work? Heck, I'd have more confidence in something that was actually proven to work than something that "might theorectically work but we won't know until we try it". I'm sure some of the nations who realize that the extinction of the human race might not be a Good Thing (tm) would be willing to pitch in the dough and recourses to work on the technology before we actually have to use it...
Mike
...then we won't have to worry about fixing the unix date problem.
they don't even know how big it is! They can't predict the movement of an asteroid thrity years from now, including how it will interact with any as-of-yet undiscovered objects that may cross its path, like comets and the like.
Next thing we hear is all the presidential candidates saying: "Look, we need to develop an asteroid defense system in forty years or we're toast! Vote for me!" (or are they already saying that?)
# debian/rules
Hmmm, interesting. I read the "real" article as well, only a few hours earlier than you.
When I read it it still stated there was a chance for impact in 2030. I noticed the page changed a few hours after I submitted the story. You can't really blame me for not being able to edit my story submission.
But thanks for pointing out the update to everyone else.
-----------------------------
Energy = 1/2 *m* v^2
so it's the velocity, not the mass that does the damage. A small Ap11 booster at 50km/s would be a bout a nuke. Watch "Armageddon" for the effects of a nuke hitting a major city.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.