Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Most people are used to measuring atomic explosives in terms of kilotons and megatons. Gigatons just don't register the same way mentally even though the number come out the same. It's the same reason that we continue to talk in microns instead of nanometers for microchip wire sizes and in cubic feet instead of cubic yards when dealing with the size of large tanks of liquid. You use a frame of reference people are familiar with.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Bruce Willis will be 94 in 2049! How will we get someone that old into space to blow up the asteroid?