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Tracking Possible Earth-impacting Asteroids
EccentricAnomaly writes "NASA's Near-Earth Object program has announced the Sentry automatic impact monitoring program. Check out this impact risks page showing current asteroids that might impact the Earth. The current highest risk object is 2002 CU11 which has a 0.001% impact probability in 2049... an impact that would be 58,000 megatons."
This is what government is for. If we spent half the money on this that we spend on those two horrible asteroid movies, we wouldn't have a thing to worry about.
...to say "58,000 Megatons" vs "58 Gigatons".
I mean hey, a Gigaton is big, but a 1000 Megatons? Whoa, you're talking some serious tonnage there!
Personally I'd go for the max fear-factor and say 58,000,000 tons...
The best candidate is half a mile wide, it should be a fairly quick and painless death.
Alright! For the last two years, I have been looking for a reason to keep the bomb shelter in good repair. Before I was born, it was there in case of nuclear war. Then, the cold war ended, and there was a time when the shelter served no purpose. Thank the gods for y2k, there was once again a reason to keep it clean. But the computers continued to work, damn it! I damn well want to us my bomb shelter! Now, I have 47 years of anticipation. Well, its better than nothing, I suppose.
Rhapsody in Numbers
...Now if someone could just warn us of bad movies about asteroids hitting the Earth!
The article claims that the probability of impact is 0.001
The site, however, gives an impact probability of 1.0e-5, which is 0.00001.
I take it someone failed to read the article carefully before submitting.
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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
a probability of 0.00001 is 0.001 percent
a probability of 1 is 100 percent
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
The probability of impact for CU11 object is actually 0.0021% which is twice as scary. The 0.0021% figure comes from adding the probablities of all of the guessed trajectories.
For those of you scratching your heads about it being 0.0021% instead of 0.000021 (2.1e-5) its because you have to multiply by 100 when converting a raw probablity to a percetage chance.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Sentry automatic impact monitoring system... Damn thing better monitor the impacts automaticly. It's not like there will me any people to care after an impact with an energy equil to the detonation of 52,727,272,727,272,727 grams of trinitrotoluol!!!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
But it would take much less TNT to wound a Gorn.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
So in 47 years we might die.
Tahts scary. Not the dying bit, the fact its 47 years - by far the most common number in the universe.
I'm sure these guys have the metric/standard thing fixed for these trajectory calculations. I mean it is NASA and they would never make a silly mistake like that right? um.. right?
How many times has your computer spit out the wrong answer but you accept it as true, just to find out later that you fed it the wrong data? I would sort of like to see them put at least as much effort into tracking earth crossing asteroids as say... modeling nuclear explosions.
I mean the JPL's computer is number 374 on the top 500 list not number 1, with number 5 acting as a glorified graphics card.
ASCI Blue, a 32,524,800,000-transistor graphics card: 50 million dollars
GeForce 4, 63,000,000-transistor graphics card: 450 dollars.
Time for ASCI blue's power to be available at retail following Moore's law: 14 years
Amateur computer enthusiasts and astronomers saving the world: priceless.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
At least they advertise the lotto chances as 1 in 7 million.
0.000021 is 1 in 47,619
Does that make you feel better?
Better is not good here, you realize.
;-)
I just realized some might not see the gallows humor.
Bottom line: The Earth is 147 times more likely
to be hit by the asteroid than you are likely
to win the WA lotto jackpot with a single ticket.
That should not make you feel better. OTOH, it's
as good an excuse as any to start doing what you
know is right
> Bottom line: The Earth is 147 times more likely
> to be hit by the asteroid than you are likely
> to win the WA lotto jackpot with a single ticket.
So buy 147 lotto tickets. That'll make the odds equal.
Bruce Willis will be 94 in 2049! How will we get someone that old into space to blow up the asteroid?
Woo, there's one with 1.8% probability of hitting us! But it's only 40 meters.. I wonder if they compensate for atmospheric burn on those "small" rocks.
With the annoying inverse square law for radars, you're be pretty much reduced to optics. Plenty of space to eyeball this side of pluto orbit.. Anyone actually looking to the right direction with a high-power telescope is pretty low, isn't it?
So what's the probability of the "Big Mama" showing up on the threat list with any kind of meaningful lead time?
With the words of wisdom that went flying out of
President Bush's mouth, we are more likely to be
involved with a nuclear war than an asteroid strike. I want all to know here that I am not
for preprogramming the nuclear arsenal for China,
Syria, etc. Gee... what was he low on blood sugar? I think the best way to promote peace is
free trade!
.001 percent? Why bother?
Assuming the submitter did his/her math correctly...
I know 0.001% isn't *that* great a probability (1 in 100,000), but it's a little daunting to think that the probability of Earth being smacked by a huge asteroid during my lifetime is about 1000 times better than my chances of winning the lottery.
(And yeah, that's just that one asteroid, so the real chance would be even a bit higher.)
Gives new meaning to "live for today", eh?
The probability for an impact in 2049 is 1e-5 which is 0.001%. If you take range of years you can get a higher probabilty, but I thought the probabilty of impact in a given year was more interesting than over an arbitrary range of years.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
If I remember there was an article a few years back that said we only are able to track a small percentages of asteroids in orbits that come near the earth. Now perhaps technology has improved quite a bit in the past couple of years, but it only takes 1 big one to kill most of the earths population. What I'd really like to hear is not the percentage chance of those we know about hitting us, but instead the percentage that we dont know about.
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
There are probably two choices if a large comet or meteor is on a collision course with earth: * Bend over and kiss your a** goodbye or * http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/
The cummulative probability cited for 2002CU11 is states as 2.1e-05. The expression "e" is not the same thing as base "ten". This works out to 1.4% probability of impact.
What I want to know is how they take into account the smaller asteroids that they cannot track. Every once in a while they must collide with tracked ones, so how do they provide for that in their tracking program? Or do they not worry about it at all, and just revise their courses when a visible deviation is seen...? Hmmm...