Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

Paradoxish writes: "Gah. According to cnn.com an asteroid hiding in an astronomical blindspot nearly blindsided Earth. The scary part is that scientists didn't notice it until four days AFTER it passed by. Apparently, it would've been similiar to the Tunguska explosion. Scary." As long as they keep missing Earth, we're OK.

Comments

Oh, no...

[O2n]

Now I'll really get to live to see the HURD released...

[ducks]

Re:Oh, no...

[GoatTroll]

doubt it

This is getting scary

[Nero216]

Maybe I'm still asleep, but haven't there been several recent close calls by asteroids lately? Anyone else freaked out?

Re:This is getting scary

[Reid]

His point, which you seem to have missed, is that there is clearly someone out there pelting us with rocks and garbage.

Re:This is getting scary

[Second_Derivative]

Major hit? Read the story mate, 1908 doesnt sound like 50k years ago. That hit Siberia, and be damn glad too else you'd probably be living in New New York by now.

Re:This is getting scary

[ackthpt]

Scary nothing, I bought a pickup truck to catch one of these babies so I can sell chunks of it on eBay. The least it could do is break off a few bits and send them my way. I mean, heck, how'm I supposed to pay off this truck without some help? Don't get me started on the odds with the lottery.

Calculations

[ProfMoriarty]

Since they can calculate where something may hit Earth, has anyone calculated where this one COULD have hit? ... the article didn't say anything about it ...

Re:Calculations

[PD]

The asteroid was spotted only after it passed us. If we knew the trajectory of the asteroid, then we would have been able to calculate that it would miss us. If the asteroid was going to hit us, then depending on how far out, they might be able to guess which ocean it would fall into, or which continent might get hit.

Re:Calculations

[WolfWithoutAClause]

If you do the precise calculation, you find that it couldn't have hit, because it missed!

Strange that ;-)

Re:Calculations

[Lars T.]

Wthout any more information, my guess it could have hit anywhere within ca. 50% of earth's surface. If it had been 288,000 (plus/minus a few thousand) miles closer.

Re:Calculations

[laserjet]

You, my friend, are management material! You will be promoted shortly. Well done.

Re:Calculations

[Snard]

I think the question that was being asked was, if the earth had been in the path of the asteroid, which hemisphere/continent(s) would have been most likely to have been struck? Granted, it's most likely that it would have been the northern hemisphere, since it's spring here now, and the asteroid is probably in the ecliptic. And probability says it would have hit water.

Re:Calculations

[rseuhs]

which hemisphere/continent(s) would have been most likely to have been struck?

This doesn't make sense.

You have to make assumtions - for example change the path, speed and time when/where the asteroid had to be to hit earth. Where on earth it hits, depends on those assumtions and because there are millions of possible assumtions that lead to this result, you get millions of possible targets on earth.

This is like asking what number would have hit a dart player who missed.

since it's spring here now, and the asteroid is probably in the ecliptic.

That would be summer. In spring any location is possible.

Re:Calculations

[grytpype]

ROFL!

Re:Calculations

[Anonymous Coward]

Calculations. NASA. Wonder if they checked thier units?

Re:Calculations

[forand]

You have to make assumtions - for example change the path, speed and time when/where the asteroid had to be to hit earth. Where on earth it hits, depends on those assumtions and because there are millions of possible assumtions that lead to this result, you get millions of possible targets on earth.

Why would you have to make any assumptions? If you are attempting to predict where an incoming object will impact the Earth one would use observations of that object to determine is velocity and position, if these are measured accuratly enough, which can be done using interferometers, you can calculate exactly where it will start to interact with the Earth at which point you begin to have uncertainty due to atmosphereic interactions.
One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.

Re:Calculations

[Tosta Dojen]

This is like asking what number would have hit a dart player who missed.

I dunno... I once saw an 8 come down off the board and start beating the crap out of a dart player who missed his shot entirely. The dude was slightly drunk, too, so the 8 was really trashing him before the rest of us got them apart. Of course, the 17 is pretty irritable too -- I wouldn't be surprised if one of them ever gave somebody a smack in the head.

Re:Calculations

[Anonymous Coward]

If I shoot bullet at an apple I can tell you which side it would have hit even if I miss.

...unless the damn thing ricocheted off the moon. :)

Re:Calculations

[clarkcox3]

Why would you have to make any assumptions? If you are attempting to predict where an incoming object will impact the Earth

We're talking about an object that didn't hit the Earth. If one were to try and say, "Well, if it had hit the Earth, where would it have hit?", they might as well ask, "If I were female, how tall would I be?". Both are nonsense questions because in order to answer them, you'd have to make assumptions with no basis in reality.

one would use observations of that object to determine is velocity and position, if these are measured accuratly enough, which can be done using interferometers, you can calculate exactly where it will start to interact with the Earth at which point you begin to have uncertainty due to atmosphereic interactions.

The point is that it didn't hit. One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids. I assume that by "in the ecliptic", he meant that it was inside the Earth's orbit (i.e. closer to the sun).

Re:Calculations

[WowTIP]

well, not really.

Since the miss was a "close miss" some astronomer could probably tell you what side of earth would have been facing the asteroid if it had hit earth.

Re:Calculations

[Genjuro Kibagami]

Well, we're talking about two moving bodies, there are only a certain amount of impact points across possible axis' on the earth, I guess if one stopped moving for a while you could at least draw a band across the surface of the planet indicating possible impact sites if the speeds of the two moving bodies were different.

Re:Calculations

[rseuhs]

Why would you have to make any assumptions?

Because obviously the thing did not hit us.

Imagine a dartplayer missing the dartdisc - how are you going to answer where would he hit it when he would have hit it?

Re:Calculations

[rseuhs]

/me rolls eyes

The asterioid probably didn't cross the earth's path exactly, so you got to reset it. Question is where? Do you put it exactly on the path to get a possible hit at the equator region? Or the northern or southern hemisphere?

Re:Calculations

[Genjuro Kibagami]

"Probably didn't" and "could have" are not that far removed from one another, until we see the respective data for both issues we can't offhand say whether it's completely impractical to judge where the projectile may have hit.

Re:Calculations

[LMCBoy]

One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.

I assume that by "in the ecliptic", he meant that it was inside the Earth's orbit (i.e. closer to the sun).

The ecliptic is the projection of the Earth's orbital plane onto the sky. It is also the path that the Sun appears to follow across the sky over the course of a year. The parent poster's reference to the ecliptic doesn't make much sense. It's true that most solar system bodies lie near the ecliptic, because the solar system is relatively flat. However, the Earth is tiny compared to the size of the solar system; the asteroid could have hit either pole on any day of the year and still be considered near the ecliptic plane.

Actually...

[gergi]

The asteroid was installed with a propulsion system and aimed at New Jersey. Unfortunately, due to a conversion factor from metric units, the asteroid missed Earth completely.

Re:Actually...

[roberto0]

I think a collision with New Jersey might be more detrimental for the asteroid...

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

One more joke about New Jersey, and I'm comin' over there with my baseball bat and my brother "Fingers" Malone. Kapish?

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what? You gonna sing some Jon Bon Jovi songs?

I'd rather have the asteroid.

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey.. Don't knock Bon Jovi man. He's an 3l33t h4x0r too.

Don't believe me? Check out his official website.

Re:Actually...

[CokeBear]

Him and Wil Wheaton should run for Congress/Senate/President.

Re:Actually...

[guyrotondo]

Oh, come on! The only parts of New Jersey that are unpleasant are Camden and Newark, overflows of Philly and NYC, so don't blame it on Jersey! Can't we just agree on a place that everybody agrees is completely worthless? France, for instance.

Does anyone know

[linzeal]

What would happen if an asteroid of a given size hit the moon? A place with equations on velocity, density, and angle of entry for the meteor would be nice.

I would imagine that impact material from the moon could make secondary impacts on earth and the ocean would be a little whacky. Could a tsunami be born out of such an event if the asteroid was large enough?

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

it would have pretty big to split the moon into pieces. considering that the earth, mars, etc are bigger targets and have not been shattered lately, i'd say you have nothing to worry about.

Re:Does anyone know

[Enry]

Take a look at the moon sometime and see the nice (bigger) craters on the moon. It's been hit before, it will be hit again, it will still be there tomorrow.

Re:Does anyone know

[nigelthellama]

That thought reminds me of the cut-scenes from "Third Rock" with the planets wacking eachother like billiards balls. Scary thought though.

Re:Does anyone know

[linzeal]

Nah, I'm not talking crazy big like ceres most of the male named asteroids are no bigger than a few kilometers. I'm talking about ejecta from the impact.

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

Beat up a palestinian too, no one will care anyways.

Re:Does anyone know

[Negadecimal]

What would happen if an asteroid of a given size hit the moon?

If it had the same mass as the moon and collided on a tangent to the moon's orbit, it would replace the moon in our sky. Our "old" moon would go flying off into space.

That would be cool. Kind of like one of those executive toys. Of course, I'm assuming an unlikely inelastic reaction...

Re:Does anyone know

[SrlKlr]

What would happen if an asteroid of a given size hit the moon?

What is more interesting is if you think about what would happen if the moon was to go away (like maybe knocked out of orbit or something like that). Forget the simple things like screwing up light at night and night time criters. Think about tides and how they are directly affected by the moon. And since the weather is extremely dependant upon the temperature of the ocean, this would completely, change the weather across the globe. Colder areas would become colder and warmer areas would become warmer without some type of climate circulation. Lots of factors for a hunk of rock flying around the globe...

Re:Does anyone know

[Wiener]

If it had the same mass as the moon and collided on a tangent to the moon's orbit, it would replace the moon in our sky. Our "old" moon would go flying off into space.

-1, Unoriginal

You just ripped that off from an old TV show.8^)

Re:Does anyone know

[l810c]

Would this cure lycanthropy?

Re:Does anyone know

[edrugtrader]

asteroids hit the moon all the time... it doesn't have an atmosphere, that is why it has all those craters.

i have no idea how big an asteroid would have to be to completely fuck things up, but there are some HUGE craters already there.

Re:Does anyone know

[quantaman]

I'm appalled! Imagine someone posting something that isn't completely original on slashdot!!

Re:Does anyone know

[ArcticChicken]

From http://aswww.phy.ncu.edu.tw/ast101/spacenew.htm (link here):

There is also evidence that monks in Canterbury, England,observed an impact on the moon in June 1178. Astronomer-geologist Jack Hartung has linked the observations recorded by the monks with the crater Giordano Bruno, one of the youngest craters on the Moon.

That's a theory that's been around for at least 20 years. Some people doubt it - do a search for "Hartung" and "Giordano Bruno" for more articles.

Also, more recently, it's believed a meteor from a Leonid shower struck the moon.

A search for "meteor impact" and "moon" will turn up lots of other possible examples.

Most of the impactors are (obviously) trivial compared to the size of the moon. At best, you'll get a pretty crater.

Re:Does anyone know

[SuperKendall]

The definitive answer lies here

Admittedly, that was a runaway planet travelling between the earth and the moon - but a case could me made for a large enough asteroid hitting the moon causing an equivilent amount of cosmic destruction, though perhaps the exact increase of mutations/wizards would differ.

Re:Does anyone know

[queequeg1]

All this would show is that Martin Landau and all the others associated with Space 1999 were the true sci-fi TV visionaries rather than Roddenberry or JMS.

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

Killed/Injured Israel 286/1024 Palestine 1125/20,000+

Here's a tip: If you whacky Arabs would quit straping bombs on yourselves and flying planes into buildings and such, those numbers will be alot lower! Try it sometime!

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly what you asked about, but how about the effects on the earth? Go to:
http://www.hour25online.com/
and take a listen to the previous show from November 5, 2000 with Dave Tholen and Bill Bottke, two astronomers specializing in planetary science.

This requires something which will play streaming MP3s.

Re:Does anyone know

[denzo]

Equation for momentum: m_a*v_a + m_b*v_b = m_a*v_a' + m_b*v_b'

The LHS is initial velocities, and RHS is final velocities. Since an asteroid collision would likely be a plastic collision (i.e., object stick together), the final velocities for objects A & B would be the same. Assume that the moon's velocity is zero, since we are determining the relative change in velocity. Thus you would get an equation like thus to find the final velocity of both objects combined:

v' = (m_asteroid * v_asteroid)/(m_asteroid + m_moon)

Where m_moon = 7.35E22 kg. Assume that v_asteroid = 10km/s, and in order to get a significant change in the moon's velocity (say 1 m/s), the asteroid would need to be going 7.35E18 m/s. If the asteroid was the same density as the moon (3340 kg/m^3), then that would mean a spherical asteroid of a diameter of 16 km. (assuming that I did that all right).

Pretty big asteroid, I think a global killer is considered to be a 1 km long asteroid. Recalculate the above equation for different assumptions.

Re:Does anyone know

[Tattva]

What is more interesting is if you think about what would happen if the moon was to go away ... Colder areas would become colder and warmer areas would become warmer without some type of climate circulation

Well, I for one will take this scenario over a 100 ft super-saiyan Gorilla.

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

1m/s is pretty fast, even in space. You don't need to change the speed of something by that much to screw things up.

Re:Does anyone know

[Negadecimal]

You just ripped that off from an old TV show [imdb.com]. 8^)

Um, I'm talking about the moon being replaced by an asteroid. Not quite the same thing...

Re:Does anyone know

[cpaluc]

Anything over 50 metres diameter would probably be big enough to wipe out all life on the moon ...

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave Tholen was once voted Usenet Kook of the Month (and yes, it's the same guy, U of Hawaii astronomy department blah blah blah)

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6iabvd%24e3 d% 242%40camel18.mindspring.com&oe=ISO-8859-1&output= gplain

You can read his insights at comp.os.os2.advocacy on Usenet. An interesting individual, to say the least.

Re:Does anyone know

[Alsee]

Of course, I'm assuming an unlikely inelastic reaction...

At that kind of energy level solid rock flows like a fluid. Fluids do not have inelastic collisions.

-

Re:Does anyone know

[JabberWokky]

Neil Comins wrote a great book about this and other interesting concepts like it. The book is literally titled What If The Moon Didn't Exist?. I own an ancient copy in hardcover, but it's still a great "what if" science book. (As opposed to the good "what if" science fiction books).

--
Evan

Re:Does anyone know

[Darth_Burrito]

Moon, slingshot around jupiter, corner pocket.

Re:Does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

it is like a mini-jupiter for the earth. (for those of you who didn't know, jupiter performs the function of "sweeping up stray asteroids" by being large enough that they crash right into it.) For all we know, a moon might be a requirement for life. Earth like planets without a moon might be struck too often, causing no life, or perhaps primative life. (WHICH RAISES THE QUESTION.... would we be more advanced if the moon was bigger? (Thus making less asteroids hit the earth, thus, speeding up evolution because it decreases the amount of times life becomes diminished.))

Re:Does anyone know

[Anarchofascist]

Momentum? Who cares about momentum? How about kinetic energy?

radius=1000; //metres
density=3340; // kg/m^3
volume=radius*radius*radius*M_PI*(3.0/4.0); m^3
mass=density * volume;//
velocity=10000; // m/s
kinetic_energy=mass*vel*vel/2;

I get a total energy output of 3.9x10^20 joules. One kilo of high explosive is 4x10^6 joules, so we get a yield of 9.8x10^13 kilos, or 98,371 Megatons. Not quite enough to bust a planet apart, but quite a light show!

Re:Does anyone know

[EpsCylonB]

would we be more advanced if the moon was bigger? (Thus making less asteroids hit the earth, thus, speeding up evolution because it decreases the amount of times life becomes diminished.))

Well taking that line of thought we might never have existed, it is quite possible that the dinosaurs were made extinct by a large asteroid impact. Had this never of occured it is more likely that intelligent life would have descended from them (although probably not directly). Us monkeys wouldn't of had an easy time in a world ruled by dinosaurs.

On the other hand evolution works through natural selection, some would argue that the dinosaurs had their chance to evolve into intelligent life and blew it. Perhaps they were incapable of evolving any further, a bit of a paradox really.

Re:Does anyone know

[EpsCylonB]

Wasn't roddenerry involved in space 1999 ?

Re:Does anyone know

[Tony Towers]

No, it was a Gerry & Sylvia Andreson production (who also brought you Stingray, Thunderbirds, UFO, and a host of others).

Re:Does anyone know

[stinky wizzleteats]

Actually, it would just kind of go schplut and turn into an exploding amalgam of molten rock. Part of it might reach escape velocity and haul ass for god knows what, a good bit would hit the Earth and Do Something Immensely Bad, and the rest would congeal into a rotating blob that would eventually cool off and compact enough to become another moon, maybe 2 or more.

Hardness doesn't scale on the planetary level. The physics of moon-sized objects (although rocks) interacting isn't like billiard balls, but is more like snowballs hitting each other in mid-flight.

Re:Does anyone know

[ShavenYak]

It's also possible that a certain number of disasters are needed to keep evolution going. In other words, without a mass extinction every so often, intelligent life might never develop.

We just don't know, because we have only one data point (Earth) and no clue what it would be like with no moon, or without Jupiter, or if we were 10 million miles further from the sun.

Whew! That was close....

[Anonymous Coward]

The space boulder passed Earth within 288,000 miles (461,000 kilometers) -- or 1.2 times the distance to the moon

It seems like

[DeltaBlaster]

It seems like we are starting to hear about some asteroid missing us a few times a year now. Has anyone ever heard of Nasa having any sort of plan on what to do if an asteriod ever was going to hit earth? (Even though according to that article the odds are currently 1 in 10 million")

Re:It seems like

[return 42]

Sure, NASA has a plan. They'll spend 400 million dollars developing an overcomplicated robot to land on the asteroid, and said robot will develop a fatal glitch en route. Oops.

Re:It seems like

[DeltaBlaster]

Yup.. Im sure one of the tech's will just install Window's to save the time of developing their own operation system :-) .. All of a sudden all the monitors in mission control will fill with BSOD's :)

Re:It seems like

[O2n]

anyone ever heard of Nasa having any sort of plan on what to do if an asteriod ever was going to hit earth

How does "pray and repent" sound? Would you make public this kind of "contingency" plan? :)

Re:It seems like

[Tackhead]

> Has anyone ever heard of Nasa having any sort of plan on what to do if an asteriod ever was going to hit earth?

Has anyone ever heard of Congress giving NASA the budget required to come up with any plan more effective than "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye."

The dinosaurs are extinct because they lacked a space program.

More the pity homo sapiens, who was smart enough to invent rockets, smart enough to realize the nature of the threat, but too dumb to do anything about it.

Prediction: 24 hours after the asteroid impact, the surviving Congresscritters call upon the surviving sheeple to burn down and lynch all aerospace industry personnel because "NASA should have been able to warn us!"

Maybe our descendants, 500 years after the Great Burn, will do better.

Re:It seems like

[quantaman]

Simple, hire a bunch of oil rig hands and send them up into space after a few days training and give them lots of really high tech toys and let them try to drill a hole in the asteroid and drop a nuke into it.

Re:It seems like

[jafac]

I dunno, I think that the airport security should have been able to prevent Sept 11, and I don't see a big hue and cry to lynch the metal detector jockeys and their bosses.

I wonder why?

Re:It seems like

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and the odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 32 million, but it seems someone wins it almost every week.

Re:It seems like

[Darby]

I think that the airport security should have been able to prevent Sept 11, and I don't see a big hue and cry to lynch the metal detector jockeys and their bosses.

Well, since the government knew about it beforehand they could have prevented it but chose not to. This is not conspiracy theory or speculation, since they warned many VIPs not to fly that day.

Re:It seems like

[adminispheroid]

Oh yes, there is a plan.

First part of the plan is make up a bunch of bullshit exaggerating the likelihood of Earth being destroyed by an asteroid. As you see, this part of the plan is pretty much in place.

Next part of the plan is to absorb as much tax money as possible for projects to track asteroids that come anywhere near Earth. This is also going nicely.

And the final part of the plan is start really sucking up the tax money with schemes for doing something about it -- usually coming from the same people who brought you SDI. And this makes a lot of sense -- many of the stupid ideas that could never stop a missile are equally applicable to asteroids.

Re:It seems like

[DeltaBlaster]

It was a joke, i was hardly trying to "MS-bash"

Re:It seems like

[Zathrus]

I don't see a big hue and cry to lynch the metal detector jockeys and their bosses.

Uh... right... and so I suppose the minor fact that they're all being fired and replaced by government employees isn't effectively a lynching.

Of course, this is ignoring that 6 of the confirmed hijackers were, in fact, tagged for special screening at Boston's airport and passed through it. It's also ignoring the little detail that, to the best of our knowledge, they never took anything onto the plane that was illegal at the time.

While I hardly think that the screening mechanisms we have are effective, I also think that the INS and Customs should be getting more heat than they are.

To get (somewhat) back on target - go read A Canticle for Leibowitz for a very interesting post-apocolyptic future.

Re:It seems like

[Tuonenkielo]

And the final part of the plan is start really sucking up the tax money with schemes for doing something about it -- usually coming from the same people who brought you SDI. And this makes a lot of sense -- many of the stupid ideas that could never stop a missile are equally applicable to asteroids.

And this makes sense for WHICH reason?

Re:It seems like

[CrazyDwarf]

In the event of a water landing, your seat can double as a flotation device.
Make sure your seat and tray tables are in their full upright and locked position.

Re:It seems like

[Kintanon]

It makes sense because:
Equally applicable = not applicable at all, the exacty same degree of applicability which applies to missiles.
It's funny because it makes fun of government organizations and their love of creating things which have no long term productive value but provide secure lifelong employment for many many useless people.
This is not to imply that I believe any of those things are true of nasa, only to explain to you the previous posters comment, since you didn't get it.

Kintanon

Re:It seems like

[jafac]

INS and Customs ARE getting some heat (some people are calling for the dismissal of the head of the INS) - not enough in my opinion.

I always thought it was weird that they used to allow me to carry a pocket knife onto planes. It was obvious then, and it's sure obvious now that planes could be hijacked by a team of knife-weilding terrorists. As "unimaginalbe" and "unthinkable" as everyone says this incident was, I hope that a lot of people had imagined or thought about it before. Or am I just a genius? Probably not. I thought that it was a crime that they allowed people to carry knives onto planes before, and an example of gross negligence.

Armageddon

[kaimiike1970]

Is it to late to send the cast and crew and all copies of the movie Armageddon to this asteroid?

Re:Armageddon

[JimPooley]

Bruce Willis is too chicken to fly in an aeroplane, if you threatened to send him in a shuttle he'd probably shit himself!

You know what, I still want 12 yr old pussy!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get up on it...Yeah baby!!!

Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[EricKrout.com]

...as is apparent at this site. The page includes a large table of data with a listing of meteorites that have hit man-made objects (or people/animals).

PostScript, PDFs, Printing, Oh My!

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[FFFish]

Damn, can you imagine what a cow looks like after it's been hit by a meteorite? SPLAT!

I'd probably pay to see that.

Not that I have anything against cows, mind you.

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[Anonymous Coward]

"The page includes a large table of data with a listing of meteorites that have hit man-made objects (or people/animals)."

-1, Redundant

Wouldn't people qualify as manmade objects?

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[rusty0101]

Three or four questions...
How large of an meteorite would be needed to make a cow go splat? (I would suspect that it would need to be more than half the volume of the cow, otherwise the cow would probably just collapse with a jet of energy blowing it's legs out from under it...

How much kinnetic energy would be in the meteorite that large?

How close would you want to be to make that observation? Personally I would suspect that a netcam wouldn't provide enough resolution and would be destroyed long before any useful information could be sent from it. Kind of like those videos they like to show of a nuclear explosion, where nothing but commentary is happening, and suddenly you see static.

Though a baseball sized meteorite would provide enought of a show for me, though I would like to have a good sized piece of realestate between me and the cow....

Then again, I could be wrong. I'm sure someone will think I am.... :-)

-Rusty

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[LazloTheDog]

There's only one I hate more than Coppers and that's Cows.

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, man, stop posting .sigs in your comments!

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[Anonymous Coward]

funniest thing I've heard all day :P

Re:Meteorites DO Screw Stuff Up

[Anonymous Coward]

No, people are not manmade objects, nor are animals.

ELE

[crumbz]

That's great. Just wonderful. Our species keeps squabbling over the same pice of dirt for 5,000 years in the Mid-East and completely misses one of the top threats to humanity. We have the technology to give us some protection against this type of thing. Let us implement it since we apparently got a 2nd chance.

Re:ELE

[Scratch-O-Matic]

We have the technology to give us some protection against this type of thing.

Which technology is that, please?

Re:ELE

[betis70]

>>We have the technology to give us some protection against this type of thing.

Which technology is that, please?

Britney's pontoons.

Re:ELE

[Anonymous Coward]

How about if it hit Isreal? God's like.. "enough is enough already."

Re:ELE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of thermonuclear weapons? use them to diflect the oncoming asteroid.

Re:ELE

[ShavenYak]

Ever calculate the amount of energy needed to push a large asteroid off course? If we don't see it until it's crossing the moon's orbit, the entire nuclear arsenal of the world is several orders of magnitude too small.

Funding

[littlerubberfeet]

Now, chances are, me being a comspiracy theorist, either the military knew it would miss, or didn't care. Really though, we should fund the projects that look for these astroids, because at least we would know if and when it was coming, instead of figuring out, "oops that might have destroyed us". So, funding please? And I might as well put in a plug for SETI funding too. Space, along with our oceans is the last place left to explore. Why don't we? Perhaps someone can dirct me to serious, well thought out papers on the ramifications of a killer astroid/ effects of nuclear winter?

Re:Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

"Space, along with our oceans is the last place left to explore."

I disagree. We have the invisible world around us that needs further exploration. Many micro organisms have been discovered and I believe there much more than that that should be explored. Space has its wonders but the "space" around us has many undiscovered wonders IMO.

Re:Funding

[laserjet]

Not to be rude, you have a good point, but exaclty what is the solution to this problem? There really isn't anything we can do if a big asteroid hits us. In general, though, I do think NASA should have more funding, just not for this specific "problem"..

Re:Funding

[zaffir]

Exploring doesn't get us any money. That's what people care about.

"wow, there's more black stuff out here. And look, red stuff on that planet! Amazing!"

Yeah, its cool, but does that get the people of American more gas for their SUVs? Does that line the pockets of movie and music industry execs? Unfortunately, the people who control the funding for stuff like this really only care about getting enough money in order to campaign for their reelection in 4 years.

Re:Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

chances are, me being a comspiracy theorist, either the military knew it would miss, or didn't care.

It's entirely obvious, though, that the military doesn't have the technology to stealthily change the course of such an asteroid and accurately aim it at an arbitrary earthbound target, like, oh, say, Afgahnistan...

Re:Funding

[Varragon]

I put together a website that look at the threat of a large comet/meteor impact. You can find it at http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/

I love their artist's rendition

[Macrobat]

They say the asteroid is a little bigger than the Tunguska object, but they depict something that looks a little bit smaller than the moon. It's a file picture, though, because it's their conception of the asteroid that allegedly did the dinosaurs in. Still seems like something THAT big would be even more devastating.

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[Anonymous Coward]

Something that big would have split the earth into.

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[Anonymous Coward]

into what?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[Anonymous Coward]

in too?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[borgboy]

warring factions of christians and muslims?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[heybrakywacky]

I know, that friggin asteroid is huge! That's exactly what I was thinking when I looked at that thing. That thing would be a planet killer for sure. If something that big hit the earth with any velocity, it would immediately destroy the atmosphere.

The earth's diameter is around 7600 miles, and even a conservative estimate of the size of that asteroid would put it at no smaller than 10% of that, or 760 miles (or 1225 km) across.

Just for the hell of it, I went to http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html and threw in such a beast travelling at 20km/s, and the resultant impact is calculated at 109476 billion megatons.

Marvin the Martian's Conclusion: Oh dear! It looks like all Earth's oceans are boiling! Earth will have a steam atmosphere for thousands of years!

My Conclusion: They really need a new drawing to stop freaking people out. :)

Incidentally, go run the figures at the site above and look at the picture that goes with the results. Look familiar?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[charon_on_acheron]

For fun, I tried your experiment. (Where did I see that picture before??? Just recently, I know.... How funny, eh?)

As I made the asteroid larger, I noticed how wide the crater would be. With an 8000 kilometer wide asteroid, the crater would have a diameter greater than the circumference of the entire planet. Kind of silly that they didn't notice that.

Realisticly, that large of a rock would either pulverize the planet into a new asteroid belt, or a large blob of molton rock would be jettisoned out the other side. That large blob would of course also contain countless humans and other artifacts of the surface on that side of the planet. Either way, we would cease to exist.

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[WowTIP]

When I entered the data, I got:



Energy Released = 20 MT (MegaTons of TNT)

(Largest Nuclear Weapon: 100 MT)

QUAKE!! Magnitude 6.5 (largest recorded Earthquake: 9.5)

Crater Diameter: 900.0 meter(s)

Crater Depth: 175.0 meter(s)

A collision this large occurs roughly once every 440 years.

The most interresting part is the "440 years" part. When did such an asteroid hit earth the last time? Should I wear a steel umbrella?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[adminispheroid]

Let me set your mind at rest. There are no 8000 km wide asteroids. That would be bigger than three of the nine planets. We would have noticed.

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone in here speak Nglish? anyone?

Re:I love their artist's rendition

[Paradoxish]

Heh, I know what you mean. When I saw that picture I tried to imagine what an impact like that would do to Earth. Just look at the size of that sucker. An asteroid like that would probably blow Earth to bits, not just kill off the dinosaurs.

When I first saw the article I thought that was representative of what almost hit us :)

Not even Bruce...

[Wee]

...Willis could have saved us this time.

Seriously, that picture they have with their story is hilarious. A chunk 70 meters in diameter would only make a crater 700 meters in diameter (give or take). So if one assumes that picture is correct, the Earth is about 5km in diameter. :-)

But now that I'm thinking about it a smaller, closer piece like 2002 EM7 might make a good test for NEA destruction systems. It's coming back in 90 years, too...

-B

Re:Not even Bruce...

[jdaily]

FWIW, that's CNN's universal "Asteroid threat" image, so no scaling factors really apply here.

Re:Not even Bruce...

[curunir]

2002 EM7 might make a good test for NEA destruction systems.

I had no idea the National Endowment for the Arts had such systems.

It's good to know that when scientists fail to protect our planet, we can always rely on the artists!

Re:Not even Bruce...

[zaffir]

A crater 700 meters wide means pretty big damage for the surrounding area, right? Is there any info out there on how big of an area would be affected by an impact of that (relatively) small size?

Re:Not even Bruce...

[demo9orgon]

That's ok, for some people it's only about 7000 years old and flat too.

In some ways I'm pretty happy that we don't have a _real_ space program...you know, one where control is less important and exploration, innovation, and business share top billing. This way, if we do get smacked by a really fast ultra-low albedo reset button we can all enjoy reincarnation without worrying about pesticides and being stepped on by noisy bi-peds, or having our appendages plucked off by snot-nosed killers-in-training.

Re:Not even Bruce...

[jakob_grimm]

No, no! It's the National Education Association!

Re:Not even Bruce...

[Veteran]

Scaling off of the data in "The effects of Nuclear Weapons" I get a circle of total destruction with a radius of about 7 miles. Hiroshima had a circle of total destruction of about 1 mile radius. The number of people killed by the asteroid strike - given the same population density as Hiroshima would be about 2.5 million.

The earth gets hit by a rock that size about every 120 years.

We got hit by a 4 megaton blast in 1994 - the good news is that it went off over the pacific ocean where evidently nothing but the Air Force tracking satellites saw it.

Re:Not even Bruce...

[Skip666Kent]

If only Bruce Lee were still alive. He could have unleashed the tiger on that ateroid's ass...

Re:Not even Bruce...

[zaffir]

So its safe to assume that one of these hitting a well populated area is bad.

Are we sure the blast would be comparable to that of a nuclear explosion? I know the two have been compared before, but do they always translate perfectly?

Re:Not even Bruce...

[Darby]

Are we sure the blast would be comparable to that of a nuclear explosion?

Well, nuclear explosions are measured in terms of TNT explosions i.e. a one megaton nuclear blast has the same explosive force as one million tons of TNT. Radioactive affects and characteristics of the explosions would be different.

Re:Not even Bruce...

[Art Tatum]

Either way, they're both dangerous.

I know what we need!

[nigelthellama]

It's too bad Scott Safran is dead. He'd be perfect at eliminating these pesky asteroids.

Re:I know what we need!

[FurryFeet]

Informative? For Tux's sake, someone mod this up as funny! (if you don't understand why, follow the link. Pretty good).

Chances are still pretty slim.

[smoondog]

People use the moons orbit as a benchmark for closeness. This guy was 1.2 times distant the moons orbit. Remember, this is going to happen *a lot* and only a small fraction of the observations are really going to be worrisome. And besides, even if this rock did hit earth the probability that it would hit something important is small. Tsunami would be the biggest worry I think.

-Sean

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Medievalist]

If it hits you, that'll be 100% of your sample data.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Phosphor3k]

Just remember, every Asteroid is a potential "Britney killer", and should be viewed as such.

I can't live without my Britney Spears.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[isorox]

Tsunami would be the biggest worry I think.

Hits in the mid north atlantic, bye bye washington, boston, new york, florida (including our shuttle launch facilities) and the eastern seaborad of the us & canada, most of the carabiean, west coast of europe (lisbon, boudeaux, cornwall, maybe upto southampton, le harve and bristol), azores, canaries, north west africa and northen south america.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[coyote-san]

The moon's orbit is used for a couple reasons, most noticably the "lensing" effect both the earth and moon have on close misses. Something that passes this closely is going to have its orbit affected by the gravitational attraction.

As for the impact of the rock, we no longer have the luxury of only caring about the area immediately adjacent to the impact point. During the first Gulf War there was a brilliant flash seen by military satellites from an impact that exploded over the Pacific Ocean. Had circumstances been slightly different the flash would have been seen over the Persian Gulf or Middle East, and it's virtually certain that the flash would have been initially interpreted as a nuclear detonation. (Watching for such flashes is exactly why these satellites were launched.)

If the error was not quickly determined -- and it could be very difficult with another Tunguska-level event where the *only* way to distinguish it from a nuke is the lack of radiation -- then the deaths from the subsequent "retaliation" could easily dwarf the deaths from the initial impact.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yikes.

Can I have my bottle now mommy?

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[brer_rabbit]

I'm sure people in Tennessee would love waterfront property.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Tackhead]

> Had circumstances been slightly different the flash would have been seen over the Persian Gulf or Middle East, and it's virtually certain that the flash would have been initially interpreted as a nuclear detonation. (Watching for such flashes is exactly why these satellites were launched.)

The flashes from nuke detonations have certain characteristics that the flashes from asteroid/cometary fragment detonations don't.

(That said, the nuke-detecting satellites are doing a good job of keeping track of upper-atmosphere flashes from asteroid/cometary fragments. To the extent that such data can be given to NASA folks, we're getting some good science out of these things.)

Yes, a human observer on the ground may erroneously conclude they've been nuked, but any rational chain of command involving release of nuclear weapons will include verification that the supposed nuke really was a nuke and not an unfortunately-timed meteorite.

(Unfortunately, convincing the other side's troops that we hadn't developed some sort of new superweapon might be another story. The less technologically-advanced the opponent, the more the risk that they'll be able to understand the evidence that it was just Really Bad Luck.)

Thankfully, the odds of asteroid impact itself are pretty slim, and I'm much more worried about those odds - anywhere on the planet - than I am about the rock hitting the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.

(Also thankfully, the solution to both problems is the same - a bit more spent on gear to watch for rocks, and assloads more spent on R&D into cheap, heavy-lift capabilities so we have a hope in hell of deflecting them when/if we find one with our name on it. If we never find a rock with our name on it, we've got a heavy-lift capability to make space tourism, offworld solar power stations, and eventual colonization a reality. Win/win.)

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[jafac]

Seeing as how a large percentage of the muslim population of the world believes that the WTC attack was either actually perpetrated by Mossad, or the CIA (or both) in conjunction with a secret airliner remote-control system, I think that if an asteroid flew out of the sky and killed a cow in rural Iraq, we'd be hard pressed to convince them that it was anything other than a failed nuclear attack by the US.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[sheetsda]

Unfortunately, convincing the other side's troops that we hadn't developed some sort of new superweapon might be another story.

You wouldn't try to convince them we hadn't developed a superweapon. Arguably, nukes are as big or bigger a psychological warfare weapon as they are a weapon of mass destruction.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Lumpy]

Planetary bombardment with loose asteroids... now that is an environmently friendly doomsday weapon! someple call greenpeace and let them know how environmentally friendly weapond development can be!

This joke brought to you by the letter J.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember, every Asteroid is a potential "Britney killer", and should be viewed as such.

Talk about looking at the bright side of a train wreck. ;-)

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[qurk]

Hehe.

Check out The Mote in God's Eye.

Very good book!!!

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Alsee]

The less technologically-advanced the opponent, the more the risk that they'll be able to understand the evidence that it was just Really Bad Luck.

I guess after all these years it couldn't do any harm to let the cat out of the bag. I was a member of a bomber crew during WWII, and I can tell you that our nukes at the time were pieces of crap. Oh, sure, they worked fine out in the desert. Try to load them on a plane and subject them to 2 hours of vibration and they were kaput. You'd get electonics and wiring rattling around lose in the casing. Totally toast.

The Japs just had really rotten luck, they just didn't know any better, and we weren't about to explain it to them when they came running to surrender.

-

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[fredrik70]

WHo wouldn't accept some 'collateral damage' in order to get rid of britney???
unfortunate, but when it comes to the wellbeing of the planet...

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a problem here:
I don't have any evidence that didn't pass through the government as to who the perpetrators were. There's been a lot of propaganda, and I've talked to people who testified that it did happen (they saw it as rescue workers, etc.), but this doesn't say who did it.

I know that the proponderance of the evidence that I've seen favors the official interpretation, but most of that comes from the officials.

So why in the world shouldn't the muslim population believe that a it was done by some bunch of people they don't like anyway? Are they supposed to trust the word of our government? Which has lied to them more often than told the truth?

All the real evidence that I've seen says:
1) the attack happened, roughly as presented in the news media
and
2) the executive branch of US government immediately stepped in to take maximal advantage of it.
and
3) and that's it. (If you are questioning whether the government did something, then you can't take their word on the matter, so evidence that they have presented has only marginal value.)

This doesn't prove anything, but if you were already suspicious of the government, it might seem awfully convenient. And I'm not sure whether it's more rational to believe them or not. (You've got to be objective to figure that out, and I realize that I'm hardly objective here. Do you?)
.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[jafac]

Your points are all well taken, but if there are so many sources of evidence from different points, I just don't believe that the US Government is competent enough to fake that. I mean, these are the same people that brought us the Monica Lewinsky deal.

Okay, we have airport security camera footage of the alleged perpetrators.
We have ATM camera footage.
We have INS documentation.
We have witnesses at the various flight schools.
We have the passenger lists from four airplanes from two different airlines with independent corroboration from the booking agency.
We have cell phone calls from doomed airline passengers to various news agencies and private citizens.
We have information from foreign intelligence agencies tracking meetings between the alleged perpetrators and known terror operatives and Taliban/Al Qaieda.
We have planning paperwork on the attacks recovered from captured Al Qaida locations in Afghanistan.
We have a video of OBL, making statements that sounded very much as if he was aware of the attack prior to it's occurance (of course, he could just have been talking trash).

Any one, or even several of these bits of evidence can be faked. I find it much harder to believe that ALL of it was faked, even in the face of all the surrounding fishiness.

I've read many of the conspiracy theories, and I compared that to eyewitness accounts I read as it was unfolding on September 11th, right here on Slashdot, and much of the information in the conspiracy theories just does not agree with what people who were (claiming to be) there, IN the buildings, posted on Slashdot. Did the CIA send a bunch of spooks orders to post false claims on Slashdot corroborating the media's account - and then hack into Slashdot deleting posts from the people who supposedly "saw explosives planted on the 40th floor" or "heard explosions all up and down the building prior to the collapse"?

At that point, you're not rationally approaching this problem - you're rationalizing to try to prop up a shaky world view. And that's my point about the folks that believe the conspiracy theories, and my point that - people who believe that the US is evil, can do no right, and is trying to slaughter all the arabs so we can get at their oil, are going to believe whatever they want to believe no matter what evidence you present.

Re:Chances are still pretty slim.

[jafac]

Oh yeah, I also forgot that we have Moussai, who was supposedly going to be on one of the flights, and there is ample evidence that he's involved, and we have intelligence sources from foreign countries placing him in the same cities on the same dates as some of the other alleged hijackers, plus Moussai attended the same Mosque as Richard Reid, who is guilty as sin, no question about it. His shoes stink enough to prove that.

There are just too many independent sources that all fit together.

Yes there are things that don't fit (like the slow response time of the USAF to this threat, the fact that Bush didn't respond to the attack immediately, yet kept talking to the kiddies 30 minutes after the first impact and knowledge that at least two other airlines were hijacked, plus the mobilization of US forces in the days prior, plus the reports of a crop-duster dusting civillians in Louisiana that was very quickly hushed-up); but none of this equates in my mind to a government conspiracy to commit this attack and pin it on the arabs. There's something fishy going on, but it's not THAT.

(Quite OT) Where's one when you need it...

[Embedded Geek]

You know, while flipping through TV and seeing the daytime talks or seeing a trailer for the latest teen comedy at my local theatre, I gotta wonder if a Tunguska-type blast might not be a bad idea...

Calculations

[nucal]

But don't tell the grandchildren to head to the hills just yet. The odds of a collision are currently 1 in 10 million and could become even more remote with more refined calculations.

If we could just get the calculations more refined, then the asteroids will never hit us.

The world could be a better place...

[teamhasnoi]

if governments would listen to scientists who are interested in preserving the human race, instead of businesses that are interested in enslaving it.

Re:The world could be a better place...

[dillon_rinker]

Foolish teamhasnoi...don't you understand that the businesses have realized that they can't enslave us if we aren't here? Enslavement = preservation, and don't you forget it.

This message was NOT brought to you by a member of the conspiracy...

Re:The world could be a better place...

[NearlyHeadless]

if governments would listen to scientists who are interested in preserving the human race, instead of businesses that are interested in enslaving it.

Yeah, that was the promise at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that Science, with new improved Central Planning would rid of us of all this chaos and exploitation. Anybody remember how that turned out?

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Re:The world could be a better place...

[Anonymous Coward]

Protection costs money, whereas enslavement generates money. Therefore governments will *never* listen to the scientists. It's as simple as that.

Not Surprising

[White Roses]

When you consider that NEAT has less funding and fewer people than it takes to run a modest size McDonald's for a year.

Software glitch

[Jack Wagner]

This is simply not true. I happen to know, having done some consulting work for NASA that they are using a proprietary planet tracking system that runs on openBSD which is reporting false positives.

I don't want to get too technical here but basically the openBSD kernel doesn't use any real-time scheduling techniques and instead relies on an O(log(N)) algorithm which causes all double precicsion calculations to be off by +/-.0005. A smal number to be sure but when you are talking about large planets that are billions of miles away it make a huge difference.

For the record I resigned my post after they refused to address my concerns with using a substandard operating system to deal with these important matters.

Yours,
-Jack

Re:Software glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Well doh! openBSD is not a real time operating system. As Theo has repeatedly said speed is not our concern. Heck, openBSD can't even do SMP. If speed and real time performance are important to you, chose another tool. Wind River VxWorks comes to mind.

Re:Software glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

heh nice troll

Re:Software glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I certainly wouldn't trust you or your firm to handle matters of confidentiality.

Oh, and what O/S were you proposing instead? Something Microsoft?

I'm sure you feel you've taken the "high road" on this one. Maybe you should have helped with a fix or worked within the system to make a change. Instead you've resorted to tattle-taling on Slashdot, probably breaking any confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements you've signed, and walked away to let them take the heat. You're a true hero.

Re:Software glitch

[Detritus]

Sniffing glue will kill brain cells, but you already know that.

Re:Software glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you actually fall for that post or are you just joking around?

more sources...

[Audent]

Well the NEO site seems to be having a few technical hitches... so much for JPL pointing us in the right direction:

but New Scientist comes to the rescue... pointing out the whole story days before CNN had it:
..
if only we could harness the power of the slashdot effect for good...

Re:FP FP FP !!!!!!

[AlexDeGruven]

Too bad you didn't actually get FP, lamerboy (Or girl, depending on circumstances)

I'd like to think that....

[mikester911]

..there is a race of aliens out there, watching 'I Love Lucy' and getting really angry at us for spewing this crap at them, and they keep trying to hit us with giant rocks to get us to shut up, but they keep missing.

That they miss just makes them angrier, that they have to wait 40 years to see if they hit us makes them even angrier.

Personally, I think they will finally get us 37 years from now, when they see the first episode of 'Survivor', and finally make it a global effort to stop us.

Re:I'd like to think that....

[Anenga]

... but then regret it after they first see CSI and Alias only years after.

Re:I'd like to think that....

[Indras]

This is a similar idea to Starship Troopers. Unfortunately, they made a serious miscalculation when writing the script for the movie. If the "bug" aliens were truly on the other side of the galaxy, in a completely different arm, it would take billions of years (if not more) for a asteroid to travel from there to Earth at normal speeds. By that time, the galaxy itself would have changed a bit, and with the stars constantly orbiting the galaxy, and the immense amount of distance they would have to travel (through lots of unpredictable gravity fields, as well, caused by nearby stars and dark matter) would make it quite impossible to hit the Earth with a meteor. Especially since it is a moving target! The earth is travelling at approximately 1000 mph around the sun at all times...

But maybe that's just the geek in me that gets all nit-picky at sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty good movie, but there's nothing more relaxing to do on the weekend than grab the latest sci-fi movie from the local Blockbuster and point out

Re:I'd like to think that....

[cyberlync]

That may have been the gist of the movie but not the book. If I remember correctly the book never mentioned where the meteor came from. Simply that it hit earth. I think most people assume it came from a nearby location. Remember as well that the meteor did not start the war but was used as a weopon in it.

Re:I'd like to think that....

[krenskeoz]

Without the Book in front of me I am farily certain that BA got smashed the exact method of smashing was not defined. Seeing as they were throwing planetcracking nukes and that the Bugs had a space navy in the Book then it is a good bet that it was nuked.

The 'doogie' character also got killed in the book while working at a naval research facility out near Pluto. Why did they drop that part, why, why.

Pennsylvania Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Pennsylvania law requires ISPs to block asteroids.

So basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're saying is that the trillions we've dumped into NASA have been a complete waste?

Re:So basically...

[PaulGibson]

No no no. Without velcro how would Dubya tie his shoes?

Re:So basically...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe. Dubya is doopid joke, ehehe.

Like I said....

[Guignol]

... no balls...
*ducks*
Hey look at me I'm spinning.. I'm spinning...

This is too weird.

[Snard]

I've been listening to the audio book version of Niven & Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer" during my morning & evening commutes for the past week and a half. Of course, in that book, it's a comet that smacks the earth, and it's a lot more than a 70 meter diameter piece of rock.

Anyway, I've been really getting into the book the past couple days, and seeing this posting on /. was almost scary.

Re:This is too weird.

[Tattva]

been listening to the audio book version of Niven & Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer"

I remember reading that book years ago. One quote from the book has stuck with me all that time: They are up in the shuttle observing the comet, with all the microcomets and debris shining in the sun, and one of the astronauts says, "Duck's-eye view of a shotgun blast."

Gotta love it. Good book if you want to see some honest speculation about what a civilization-ending hit might do to the world. As a bonus, it's the only book I've read that makes a nuclear power plant a protagonist (IMO.)

Re:This is too weird.

[charon_on_acheron]

Great book. Loved reading the scientists take on slide rules versus calculators small enough you can hang them on your belt with a piece of rope.

I didn't think about it when I read the story earlier, but I can definitely see how you'd freak out if you're in the middle of the story like that. Time to sit down, have a drink, and check the Weather Channel.

By the way, who is reading the story? How good of a job do they do? I've never used one of those audio books, but that one could be great for it.

Re:This is too weird.

[Snard]

I've actually read the book before, many years ago, but many of the details have faded, so the audiobook version is a re-read for me. The reader is Connor O'Brien - he does a pretty good job with the book, especially giving the different characters distinctive voices. You can here a snippet of him reading the book here

Re:more sources... Take II

[Audent]

dunno what happened there... something ate my links!
New Scientist story here:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?i d=ns999 92052

JPL near earth orbit site here: but for the lack of anything actually on the site...
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/ca_home.html

Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[MSG]

Everyone knows that the Tunguska explosion was a result of Nikola Tesla's experiments:

http://www.frank.germano.com/tunguska.htm

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[Inthewire]

Yes. Thank you. I agree with this post. Goddammit, I get tired of people who think extraplanetary objects are the answer to everything. Tesla is the answer to everything. Tesla, or surface area. Just about the right answer for any occasion.

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[Drakin]

Could it be? A Spider Robinson fan?

There is intellegent life on slashdot!

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[PhxBlue]

Sorry, but I couldn't read it after I saw the article mention "ancient astronauts" with a straight face.

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[quantaman]

Do you mean,
Associating Tesla with the Tunguska event comes close to putting the inventor's power transmission idea in the same speculative category as ancient astronauts.

The article is quite an interesting read although it kind of takes off and begins to sound like a mad scientist conspiracy theory after that point but they do raise some interesting points (or at least give some interesting history).

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[bigbadwlf]

Actually, have you ever seen a show called "The Phenomenon Archives"? It's hosted by Dean Stockwell.

They did a show on the Tunguska explosion. The thing is no explanation really fit. There was a reason it couldn't have been a meteor, or Tesla's experiments, or whatever.
The only explanation that did fit was that it was a nuclear powered (alien) craft entering the atmosphere at too shallow an angle and beginning to bounce back out before exploding.

Maybe. Maybe not. The point is they managed to rule out every other explanation.

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there is another explanation. Please stop wasting hard drive space on Slashdot with your half-assed theories. Grow a frontal lobe and do a little research... a Google search normally helps.

Re:Tunguska Meteorite is nonsense

[EpsCylonB]

Tesla is the answer to everything. Tesla, or surface area. Just about the right answer for any occasion.


I'm gonna blame el ninio.

Blindspot???

[Muddie]

The article mentions that they couldn't see the meteor because it came from the same side of the planet as the Sun...the Sun is a blindspot??
Yikes!

Re:Blindspot???

[NorthDude]

definition of blind
1.a Sightless.
...
To deprive of sight: was blinded in an industrial accident.

Spot
A place of relatively small and definite limits.

So a bling spot would be a place of reltively small and definit linit wich deprives you of sight.
So yes, the sun could be considered a blind spot, has it actually deprive you of your sense of sight. To much or not enough lights entering your eyes and they become useless. It is called in photography "dynamic range", I don't know however how it is called when talking about eyes...
This is recursively on topic!

Re:Blindspot???

[redcliffe]

Well you can't point a telescope towards the sun and expect to see something! You can only see Mercury(most of the time) after the sun has set.

Re:Blindspot???

[Profane Motherfucker]

Now, I'm probably not the first cocksucker to say this, but FOR FUCKS SAKE, HOW DO YOU LOSE AN ASTEROID? Let's not banter around terms like 'blind spot' when we're talking about a huge fucking rock speeding towards Earth. A fucking Pinto, the piece of ghetto shit it is, has a blind spot. What kind of stupid bitch reporter came up with that faggoty line. I lose a motorcyclist in my blind spot. A hugeass rock moving about Mach 999999 is not exactly some eurotrash mullet sporting mofo riding a leaf blower down the street.

I wish science would get off it's high horse and quit fucking us up the ass with its pedantic and rather insulting dumbed down descriptions. Stupid cunts.

Re:Blindspot???

[Anonymous Coward]

They never saw the asteriod in the first place. When a cop pulls you over, and hides behind his flashlight, you can't see that he has his hand on his gun. The asteroid came from the direction of the sun, and like trying to catch a fly ball in the outfield, earth's inturments were blinded by it. There's always stars above you, you just can't see them from 9-5 because the sun causes the atmosphere to glow blue, and drown them all out.

Re:Blindspot???

[Tattva]

Well you can't point a telescope towards the sun and expect to see something!

I suspect it is a blind spot not because of the atmospheric effect (we do have Hubble in orbit, and masking for terrestrial telescopes, after all, and if it were directly in line then we would see its profile as a dark spot on the sun) but because if an object is (nearly) between the observer and the light source, only a tiny portion of its surface would be illuminated from the perspective of the observer.

Re:Blindspot???

[ElderKorean]

I don't think that there's any way that they're going to point Hubble towards the Sun at all. Hubble looks at very low levels of light, and looking towards the Sun could well damage the internals beyond repair.

I've never seen pictures of the Earth or the Moon from Hubble for likely the same reasons.

Re:Blindspot???

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wondering, how can there be a blind spots when Earth gets to look at the other side of the Sun every half-year?

Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

[return 42]

Pah, big deal. "Stealth Asteroid Hits Earth", now, that would be a headline...

Re:Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

[Lars T.]

No. "Giant Stealth Asteroid Hits Earth And Nobody Notices Until 5 Days Later" - that would be a big headline ;-)

Re:Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

[Tony Hoyle]

Maybe if it hit somewhere that nobody would miss.... Belgium perhaps?

Questions...

[tonywong]

1. Was this asteroid known before it came past us, and how come it wasn't plotted with a trajectory before if it was known.

2. How has coming so close to the Earth affected its orbit/period?

When if...

[Anonymous Coward]

It hit Afghanastan 10 days ago...

And when it finally hits

[mnordstr]

I guess we won't be reading it on /.

Re:And when it finally hits

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if the events of Sept. 11 are judged, you may well be reading about it on /.

On Sept 11, /. was one of the only sites still up and running.

Re:And when it finally hits

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that depends on the size of the thing...

NASA?

[Smallest]

No, we're gonna let the EU handle this one themselves.

-c

Political Repercussions

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger concern for a stealth asteroid of such a small size, if it did hit a populated area, would be the political repercussions. In these hyper-sensitive times, with destruction on an H-bomb scale, who's to say what further disaster such a natural event might mistakenly spin off? If it destroyed Atlanta, say, the finger of blame may all too quickly point to a terrestrial source -- with even more tragic consequences.

Re:Political Repercussions

[Anonymous Coward]

Early warning radar would pick it up before it hit, at least giving us a couple hours notice.

See?!

[EricKrout.com]

Yet another reason to implement a multi-trillion dollar Star Wars Automated Missile Defense system. It's so easy to program that I'm sure we could have it shooting down nuclear weapons and asteroids SIMULTANEOUSLY!

m o n o l i n u x :: PDFs Rule!

Re:See?!

[SerialHistorian]

Except that if we let the gov't program it, it'll run on windows...

Oh god no!, NOT the earth...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is where I keep all my stuff....

Re:Oh god no!, NOT the earth...

[jgerman]

Uh moderators, that should be funny, let me hit you with a clue stick. Tick references are ALWAYS +1 Funny ;)

Re:Oh god no!, NOT the earth...

[caliban]

...I can't stress highly enough the importance of off-site backups in any responsible contigency plan

Asteroid Terrorism!

[Mortice]

Yet another reason why we need National Missile Defence!

Re:Asteroid Terrorism!

[tomstdenis]

I know you are kidding but that is a good example of U.S superiority. A world problem must have a U.S dominated solution

What could we do

[Tremul]

What would our options be if we knew a deadly one was coming? Panic?

Re:What could we do

[syscalls]

Douglas Adams always promoted the following:

DON'T PANIC!

(in large friendly letters) :-)

Re:What could we do

[Laser_47]

Depends on how far away we notice it. Ideas have been pushing it off trajectory with either rockets (lotsa fuel needed) or exploding a nuclear device nearby pushing it off course. If it's on the far side of Jupiter when we do that, we only need to push it 0.0001 of a degree to alter it's course enough to miss us. If we don't notice until it's on the other side of the moon, we won't have time to get the paperwork together to launch a shuttle, let alone do something about it.

Re:What could we do

[Anonymous Coward]

Duck 'n Cover... (:

Tunguska vs. Ocean?

[D_Fresh]

What would happen if an asteroid this size exploded over the ocean? Which is to say, it's small enough to disintegrate before actually impacting the planet, but large enough to produce that 4 megaton blast they mentioned in the article (which would flatten Atlanta).

But it seems the most likely scenario is that it would be over an ocean when it blew - indeed, isn't it possible that this has already happened and no one picked up on it? Perhaps not in modern times, when we have more sensors and satellites watching the planet, but in the pre-Tunguska days it could have happened. My guess is that an incident like that would be more or less harmless, except to passing ships or sea critters close to the surface.

My God, I sound like Jack Handy. "If you met two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you say liked dolphins more? You might guess Flippy, but you'd be wrong. It's Hambone."

One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Edmund Blackadder]

The Tunguska explosion was not caused by an asteroid.

1) there was no crater
2) noone has been able to find any asteroid materials in the area.
3) plants in the area have been discovered to have mutated DNA.

It is quite clear to me that the Tunguska explosion was caused by a miscalculated experiment of the great eccentric inventor Nicola Tesla.

BTW the official theory is that the asteroid consisted of nothing but water, it flew down to close to the surface, and then it exploded. Thats as difficult to believe as the Tesla theory imo.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Yunzil]

BTW the official theory is that the asteroid consisted of nothing but water

Got a cite for this? Otherwise I'm calling "bullshit".

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[ArsonPerBuilding]

Nikola, not Nicola. Get the names right before you try to correlate Tesla's experiments with Tunguska.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Alomex]

From space.com:

Almost no one lived near blast site, however, save a few hunters and trappers. No one studied the site until 1930. And while scientists have long presumed an asteroid or comet exploded just above the surface, no consensus has been reached. Some even suggested a miniature black hole did the work.

The object seems to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second), the BBC reported.

Why did the asteroid break apart in the air?

"Possibly because the object was like asteroid Mathilde, which was photographed by the passing Near-Shoemaker space probe in 1997," researcher Luigi Foschini told the BBC. "Mathilde is a rubble pile with a density very close to that of water. This would mean it could explode and fragment in the atmosphere with only the shock wave reaching the ground."

A scientific paper on the work will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

From bbc.co.uk:

They analysed seismic records from several Siberian monitoring stations, which combined with data on the directions of flattened trees gives information about the object's trajectory. So far, over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave.

Over 60,000 fallen trees have been surveyed to determine the site of the blast wave

"We performed a detailed analysis of all the available scientific literature, including unpublished eye-witness accounts that have never been translated from the Russian," said Dr Foschini. "This allowed us to calculate the orbit of the cosmic body that crashed."

The object appears to have approached Tunguska from the southeast at about 11 km per second (7 miles a second). Using this data, the researchers were able to plot a series of possible orbits for the object.

Of the 886 valid orbits that they calculated, over 80% of them were asteroid orbits with only a minority being orbits that are associated with comets.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[isk_s]

Check out: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0203152 for all the answers; it appeared today :-)

(Contrary to what the URL might suggest, this is *not* a porn site, but an article preprint server at Los Alamos National Labs)

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Danse]

Your .sig perplexes me. How is GNU non-free speech-wise? Seems to me it's as free as any other speech in the US, or anywhere else that has copyright laws. If the US has free speech, the GNU is just as free, if not more so, since it gives you the ability to gain even more rights to use the material if you agree to certain stipulations. Most other works don't even offer that. Anyway, just had to get that off my chest.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

Actually, there is an entire book about it. It's called "The Big Splash" IIRC, and it was written by a University of Iowa professor named Louis Frank. I haven't really been following this "ice comets" business much but I think I heard recently that there was some new evidence for his theory. You can read about it at:

http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[jfisherwa]

BTW the official theory is that the asteroid consisted of nothing but water, it flew down to close to the surface, and then it exploded. Thats as difficult to believe as the Tesla theory imo.

.. Kind of like when Russ was stuck in the backyard in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and they were running away from the water asteroids pouring down and exploding all around them. :P

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Lumpy]

Everyone knows that the Philidelphia expieriment was based on tesla's theories of time portals and Giant magnetec lenses... That was nothing more than a test that the lense imploded causing a massive radiation explosion... We studied that in history along with the military tests in 2012 with magnetic propulsion of submarines that created the first 700mph underwater vehicle that makes interdimensional travel possible today.

Oh wait, my professor told me to not say things like that when using this internet time portal... Shit... oh well being on slashdot noone will believe it anyways....

CiaO!

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[chrisleonard]

Actually, if the "asteroid" was made of water, wouldn't you call that ... a "comet?"

But as long as we're talking official theories, I believe the current theory is that the meteor was a chondrite (a carbonaceous chondrite, I think), which is a type of meteor that has about the same consistency as a dirt clod. If you slam a big dirt clod into a field of dirt, what happens? Well, apparently you can blow away lots of trees and get a lot of conspiracy theories going, but you can't find the dirt clod itself because it's all mixed into the earth itself. Chemical testing of the soils in the Tunguska region support this theory, by the way.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Edmund Blackadder]

wouldnt there be a creater?

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

wouldnt there be a creater?

It's a theory in some cultures, but most academics now believe that asteroids are formed by natural processes, and not some mystical "creator".

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Edmund Blackadder]

crater sorry ...

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Michael Snoswell]

The evidence on the pattern of trees that collapsed at Tunguska and those that didn't suggest a small comet (ie snowball) coming in at about 40deg. Computer simulations of this exactly match the pattern of trees, which is a pretty unusual pattern. No need for conspiracy therories when a little science fits the data better.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Alomex]

How is GNU non-free speech-wise? Seems to me it's as free as any other speech in the US, or anywhere else that has copyright laws.

Not even close. GNU forces you to make any modifications public. The freest-speech is public domain, which has no conditions on its (re)use.

Now one can argue that there are good reasons for the viral license. However it is nevertheless paradoxical that the RMS mantra of Free Software with Free as in "free speech" and not as in "free beer" is reality the complete opposite.

GNU software is gratis, but by no means fully unrestricted (freedom sense).

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Fesh]

As in "this event can only be described as 'An act of God...'"?

But I wonder... Which god? And why was he stuck in the middle of a forest in Siberia?

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Cerlyn]

Actually, I do, although its science fiction. Go read Callahan's Key by Spider Robinson; the entire book is based on the premise that Nicola Tesla is still alive today (read the book; I'm trying to keep the spoilers down). He built an "energy ray" that indeed did cause the Tunguska level event, and in said book the military is trying to recreate Tesla's ray for their own purposes. (Interestingly enough; Tesla in this book did not aim said ray at Tunguska; he had aimed it at the uninhabited Artic North, but screwed up on his calculations.)

Spider Robinson himself is a very good, humourous author; the best thing you can do is go out and get the book to read it yourself. Callhan's Key is one of the later books in the Callhan series, but you should have no trouble starting from there.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Anonymous Coward]

...not allowed to get away with anything, are ye?

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[3141]

Public Domain is not necessarily as free as GPL. If someone alters something which is in the public domain, they then get copyright for their altered version, which means that it is then no longer free.

For example, you try writing selling a story about The Little Mermaid and see how quickly Disney sue you. They may not be right to, but chances are they've got more money to throw at lawyers than you have.

This means that though a public domain work may be freer in the short term, it can soon be hijacked. "Public Domain EXTRA-free for a minute" is less free than "GPL QUITE-free for eternity"

See what I mean?

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[chrisleonard]

> wouldnt there be a creater (crater)?

Not necessarily.

This isn't something I'm an expert on, but I did talk to an astronomer about this recently (he is a serious professional astronomer, I am only sub-amateur hobbyist). Meteors and impact craters are not in his area of specialty, which is bad (because it means he doesn't know as much about it as he might otherwise) and also good (because he is not necessarily under tenure-track, publish-or-perish obligation to any particular viewpoint). He just seemed like a really down-to-earth guy, and he seemed genuinely convinced (and fairly persuasive) that the thing that blew up over Tunguska is thought to be a (carbonaceous?) chondrite meteor. I didn't talk with him about crater evidence, but he had just spent two hours talking with our local amateur astronomy club about meteorites and craters. The question of a crater is such an obvious thing that I can't imagine this person would not have thought of it. On the other hand, I didn't know we'd be slashdotting over it, so I didn't ask!

I have heard that the rather complex tree-flattening patterns (I'm sure they have a better term for that) can be explained by either comet or meteor. One difference between comet and meteor is that since a comet is just a big snowball, it would not be expected to reach the surface. Basically the ice would sublimate / evaporate / plasmasize / whatever and then vaporize, leaving no residual evidence. But the meteorite theory allows for something with more appropriate mass, and this particular type of meteorite would be difficult to detect. Even when people see them fall (which is very rare, I'm sure) this professor was explaining how they have to be collected right away. If you don't, this type of meteorite will deteriorate to the point where you can't really tell that "some of that dirt over there came from space" without doing some chemical analysis.

So my understanding of the theory is: it's sort of like a big shotgun firing a huge dirt clod at us. Weird, huh? It was the astronomy professor who actually said these things are like dirt clods, btw. Would it leave a crater? Maybe - depends on dispersal, the height of the meteor when it "exploded," and lots of other factors, I suppose. But I've been told that the residue it would leave would be hard for non-geologists to distinguish from, well, dirt.

As a sidebar: Impact craters aren't always easy things to identify, you know. There's one here in Iowa that was once a candidate for the "meteor that killed the dinosaurs" award. The weird thing is that you can't see it, unless you look at subterranean geologic data. Of course the Tunguska even is much more current - I'm not saying that a Tunguska crater would have filled up in about 100 years. But the point is that craters don't always look like the ones on the moon. And if the Tunguska event was an overhead explosion (as many believe), then the impact crater would be much less pronounced.

Anyway, I was commenting based largely on what this astronomy professor had shared with me recently. Feel free to disagree - I just thought it was interesting. Personally, I don't think anybody's saying we *know* what happened at Tunguska.

Just my 0.02.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[NeMon'ess]

Well since your user ID is only 12016 (bet that "16" pissed you off, eh?) you're either about six years old today, or you hijacked someones abandoned account. I'm guessing the latter since slashdot was hacked in 2006 and 50,000 user IDs and passwords got posted on kuro5hin.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[darkcompanion]

It has been widely accepted that the Tunguska explosion was created by the impact of a comet. And in fact, a comet is nothing but an asteroid built out of dirty snow.

I believe this was also a topic in the excellent 'Cosmos' series with Carl Sagan.

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[ardu]

GNU forces you to make any modifications public.

Sorry, this is simply wrong!
As long you don't distibute your derived work you are not forced to release the modifications!

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[megalomaniacs4u]

they then get copyright for their altered version, which means that it is then no longer free.

That is why it is so much freer - you can do anything. The choice is yours!

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Zathrus]

No, no, no! I'd much rather go for wild ass theories that have no basis in fundamental physics than something that's actually plausible once you know the actual data.

Now where's that damn timecube site again?

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[BlueMonk]

Heh, heh... the phrase "You're gonna be free whether you like it or not!" comes to mind :-)

If we're taking sides, I'm with GPL, BTW -- authors need *some* license to release to that will give them some protection, and GPL is the most free license that offers some assurance to the author that their work is safeguarded from various "evil" entities :-). Without GPL, so much software would continue to be closed source and inaccessible. At least GPL is *something* to encourage more open source.

The point is, without GPL, you'd have more closed source non-free software, not more public domain software.

(Hey, I know this is all off-topic, but if you're reading this thinking about that, you've been following an off topic thread down too many levels to be moderating things down for being off-topic ;-) )

Re:One of my favourite conspiracy theories

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd say that's a good possibility - especially if the material found in the trees had a high concentration of tungsten.

Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[Blackwulf]

If it pierced the atmosphere, the approximately 70-meter-long rock could have disintegrated and unleashed the energy equivalent
of a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, researchers said.

"If it were over a populated area, like Atlanta, it would have basically flattened it," said Gareth Williams, associate director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Thanks for telling me how dead I'd be if it hit here. Couldn't you have talked about it hitting somewhere where I don't live? Like Kabul, or something? Maybe Baghdad?

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[curunir]

Thanks for telling me how dead I'd be if it hit here. Couldn't you have talked about it hitting somewhere where I don't live? Like Kabul, or something? Maybe Baghdad?

They were trying to get you to imagine what the devastation might have been like. Thanks to the presidents Bush, one does not need any imagination to envision what Kabul or Baghdad would look like.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[sharkey]

Couldn't you have talked about it hitting somewhere where I don't live? Like Kabul, or something? Maybe Baghdad?

Or Redmond, Washington.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lame troll, think of a new one.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[david duncan scott]

OK:

"If it were over a populated area, like Baghdad, it would have basically flattened it," said Gareth Williams, associate director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center in Boston, Massachusetts, "but our calculations show that one fragment, about the size of a grapefruit, would hit Blackwulf square in the face, killing him instantly"

Better?

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[Anonymous Coward]

Atlanta is CNN HQ, so no surprise that they picked it as their example.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[jimbolaya]

As a fellow Atlanta, I noticed that, too. My first reaction was, "Wow! We got mentioned by a scientist! Neato!" Then I thought, "How silly, like we need an example of what a 'populated area' is?" Then I thought, why not use Boston as an example. That's also a "populated area." Then, reality hit me like said asteroid: Mr. Williams was kissing up to CNN.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[jheinen]

Hey! Not everyone living here is affiliated with The Beast. Most, but not all.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[praedor]

Yeah, it sucks, but you have to break a few eggs...

The cost-benefit analysis indicates that a Redmond strike would kill all 2 of the non-M$ lackey/employees while wiping out ALL the Redmonites. The equation definitely favors letting the strike happen.

Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN...

[gnovos]

If it pierced the atmosphere, the approximately 70-meter-long rock could have disintegrated and unleashed the energy equivalent
of a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, researchers said.

"If it were over a populated area, like Redmond, Washington, it would have basically flattened it," said Gareth Williams, associate director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center in Boston, Massachusetts, "and in the process, prove that there is a God and he does listen to the prayers of free sofware developers. This asteroid would, however, cause no damage were it to strike Hillary Rosen in her BMW. As everyone who's read the SSSCA knows, the RIAA is above the laws of physics."

Nasa has a . .

[OverlordQ]

. . near-earth Tracking Page here has a few pictures and information about Near Earth Objects.

Only thing a better monitoring system would do...

[BrianGa]

..is tell us when we're all going to die.

Not that hard to believe.

[guamman]

Most likely, some equipment picked it up. The problem is that there are not enough people and computing power to monitor it all. With the exception of the seti@home experiment and other distributed computing projects, all the telescopes and observatories on earth can only monitor approximately 1% of the sky at any given time. When you take this into consideration, I'd bet that there have been several meteors that have gone unnoticed completely. In this case, Ignorance truly is bliss.

Makes you think...

[tboulay]

All the petty sh*t going on in the world, the RIAA sueing everyone, MPAA doing the same, Microsoft Suing whoever they can, DMCA sucking, Governments doing retarded sh*t every day and everyone so pre-occupied by all of this bullsh*t, and it could all come to an end,, Just like that!! but you know what would really suck??? we'd only find out about it four days later!!!!!!!

Re:Makes you think...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, appropriate language as a result of the sh*t

Tungusa explosion and Species extinction...

[KillboyPHD]

"The heat incinerated herds of reindeer and charred tens of thousands of evergreens across hundreds of square moles."

Well thank god the square ones are all gone. Now if we could only do something about the round variety.

Re:Tungusa explosion and Species extinction...

[Nf1nk]

[joke]"The heat incinerated herds of reindeer and charred tens of thousands of evergreens across hundreds of square moles."

Well thank god the square ones are all gone. Now if we could only do something about the round variety.

See i read this to be the number of trees destroyed you know a mole 6.022e23
Now that squared times hundreds (about 200 to around 900)
lets see that should be about 3*10^50 trees thats not too many
well that makes much more sense
[end joke]

Re:Tungusa explosion and Species extinction...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahahaha... Nice. :)

Whats the point?

[red5]

From the article

Nonetheless, astronomers maintain that constant surveillance is necessary to identify more killer rocks in our neighborhood and ensure that none take our planet by surprise, in particular those traveling near the blinding light of the sun.

What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Re:Whats the point?

[surfnerd]

Haven't you seen Armageddon? We just need to find Bruce Willis.

Re:Whats the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

You can do nothing, I don't care.

Speaking for myself, I'm going to put as much distance as possible between me and the predicted impact location (or coast/shore if it's impacting in a large body of water).

Re:Whats the point?

[PsiPsiStar]

Fool! Haven't you ever seen Armegeddon?!
We fire Bruce Willis at it.

Re:Whats the point?

[limber]

I believe the proper response, upon realization that the earth is about to be smashed to bits, is to immediately head down to the pub for a couple of pints.

Either that or wet a towel and wrap it tightly around your head.

Re:Whats the point?

[Bob McCown]

What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Soil your undies, perhaps?

Re:Whats the point?

[cperciva]

if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Evacuate Atlanta?

Re:Whats the point?

[rseuhs]

What's so difficult to understand?

Let's take the example in the article:

An asteroid will flatten the Atlanta-area.

So let's assume you lifed there, what would you do?

a) Wait for the asteroid to hit.
b) Move somewhere else before it hits.

A difficult decision, I know.

Re: Whats the point?

[Black Parrot]

> What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Have you ever stopped consider how many times even a /.-reading g33k could get laid in three days, if everyone knew the world was going to end days hence?

(I have to conclude that astronomer-geeks don't have any trouble getting laid, or else they would be letting out false alarms now and then.)

Re:Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

The predicted impact location? You mean like "Earth"?

How much data did they have for Skylab? For Mir? And the best they could do was, "Someplace wet -- we hope." I don't really think they're going to say, "Quick! Lean to the left and it'll miss you!"

Re: Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

Same as before, or maybe less. Look around you. Would you want the sight of a naked /.'er to be your last vision?

Re:Whats the point?

[sulli]

Why wait for an asteroid?

[rimshot]

Re:Whats the point?

[the Atomic Rabbit]

That depends on the size of the asteroid. If it's big enough to end life on Earth, there obviously isn't much we can do to stop it. But if it's another Tunguska event, there is something we can do, i.e. don't go within a few hundred kilometres from the impact site.

Re: Whats the point?

[Black Parrot]

> Same as before, or maybe less. Look around you. Would you want the sight of a naked /.'er to be your last vision?

Surely you didn't think I was talking about getting it on with other /.ers!

Re:Whats the point?

[red5]

Evacuate Atlanta?

Good point exept. We don't know it's going to hit Atlanta all we know is that's it's going to hit Georgia.
Mind telling me how you plan to evacuate Georgia in 48 hours?

Re:Whats the point?

[cperciva]

Mind telling me how you plan to evacuate Georgia in 48 hours?

Well, hopefully we'd have more than 48 hours of warning.

On the other hand, we could call it natural selection... survival of the-most-able-to-hijack-aircraft and all that.

Re:Whats the point?

[FrankDrebin]

What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Hit it with an ICBM full of Preparation H! That stuff shrinks 'roids like nobody's business!

Re:Whats the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would we want to evacuate Atlanta?

Re:Whats the point?

[miracle69]

Mind telling me how you plan to evacuate Georgia in 48 hours?


I believe they do that drill every year. It's called "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party"

And those that don't leave will just be scattered about the state, which isn't that unusual, and we've already got a scapegoat

Re:Whats the point?

[Alsee]

The predicted impact location? You mean like "Earth"?

How much data did they have for Skylab? For Mir? And the best they could do was, "Someplace wet -- we hope."

Big difference. They were skimming the atmosphere. Kind of like skipping a rock across a pond and trying to guess where it will finally sink in. An asteroid would come straight in like a bullet.

-

Re:Whats the point?

[Alsee]

if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?

Evacuate Atlanta?

Yeah, and schedule the Microsoft trial there that day.

-

Re:Whats the point?

[Cam Wheeler]

We send Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck to stop it. Bruce will sacrifice his life so that Affleck can return to Earth and marry his daughter.

It's worked before and it will certainly work again...

Re:Whats the point?

[JimPooley]

I thought you were supposed to lie down or put a paper bag over your head or something..

Re:Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

An asteroid would come straight in like a bullet.

Why?

Seems to me they pretty much go where they go and come from where they come, at whatever angle they happen to be. In fact, given the effect of Earth's gravity on a moving object, I'd think a curved, glancing trajectory rather more likely than a full-on dive toward Cleveland.

Re:Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

Absolutely. My point lay rather with the "projected impact site" concept. I have doubts that it would be much more than a hemisphere.

Hell, when they predicted a water landing for Mir they were clearly playing the odds -- drop something anywhere in that hemisphere and it'll likely splash. It's like predicting a pavement impact if it falls in New York City.

Re:Whats the point?

[Alsee]

I was going to give another analogy, but the details weren't close enough. I wound up explaining in excruciating detail exactly what happens. I didn't mean for it to get this long :)

Separate the speed of each case into a horizontal speed it moves across the map and the vertical speed it falls.

The asteroid is moving say 3000 MPH across the map, and coming down at say 3000 MPH. They measure the trajectory really well and figure it will hit the atmosphere within a 60 mile circle. It spends a few seconds in the atmosphere. Winds and stuff have no real effect. It goes in pretty much a straight line (or at least a predictable line).

The satellite is moving 3000 MPH across the map. If there were no atmosphere it wouldn't come down - the vertical speed would be zero. There's almost no air 100 miles up, but there is a tiny bit. The wind drag slows it down by say 1 MPH each day. This causes to spiral a few hundred feet lower. After a few months it's down in thicker air and is dropping 1000 feet per day. A 2 weeks later it's dropping a mile per day. 2 days later it's dropping a mile her hour. 4 hours later it's dropping a mile per minute. A few minutes later it hits the ground.

The problem is that it's going across the map at 3000 miles per hour. If you are off by 10 minutes that is 500 miles. The other problem is that the atmosphere expands and contracts based on random solar effects and weather. If the atmosphere expands by a mile the satellite falls faster - it acts like it's a mile lower and comes down a day or hour sooner. If the atmosphere contracts a mile it comes down a day or hour later.

-

Re:Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

I agree. Thing is, I would wager that the odds are that any given asteroid would, in fact, at least begin to orbit.

Picture yourself as Joe Asteroid, bopping along through space at 2.7 zillion miles per. Over to your left there's a little blue marble. You feel strangely drawn towards it, and find yourself angling in its direction. Gradually your attraction increases, and your course becomes increasing curved toward this planet...

My feeling is that only a few fast moving rocks that happen to be headed straight for us (unlikely -- space is big) and slow-moving objects with little lateral velocity are likely to be pulled towards us sharply enough to drop straight down. Anything fast will be most likely to come in at yes, a glancing angle.

I'm guessing (based on figures that I pulled out of my ass) that's why there aren't very many killer asteroids -- most bounce off the atmosphere, or plow through the upper reaches and continue back into space, sadder and wiser chunks of rock.

Re:Whats the point?

[Alsee]

The point is that an asteroid will never spend days or even minutes gently easing down into the atmosphere. The uncertainty in the satellites crash zone is caused miniscule atmospheric effects building up over hours and days.

That's why they could say an asteroid will hit in or near Los Angeles, but they say a satellite is going to hit "somewhere in the pacific, we think. Or maybe western USA. That is, unless it comes down in China." You can predict the path of an object in the vacuum of space quite precisely. An object spending days in the edge of the atmosphere is like trying to predict the weather.

-

Re:Whats the point?

[david duncan scott]

I hate to repeat myself, but I guess I'm just not getting it: why shouldn't an asteroid skim the atmosphere? Isn't the most likely scenario something along the lines of a failed orbit, with the asteroid striking the top of the atmosphere at a shallow angle?

I just don't see any special reason to assume that a typical object will be angled sharply, and more reason to guess a shallow approach (which I am arbitrarily defining as angle less than, say, 30 degrees, with 90 degrees being a straight vetical crash). I'm still thinking that most collisions will involve, not objects aimed at Earth, but objects headed near Earth and pulled closer by our gravity -- but for a fast-mover, that pull is going to result in a shallow angle of approach, so shallow, in fact, that many will not even hit, but rather slingshot around us and keep going. Those that do hit would, I would think, have plenty of chances to bounce, break up, buffet, bank, and otherwise behave in a chaotic and unpredictable (although aliterative) fashion.

I'm also going based on a feeling that when I've seen meteor trails they've been long, which suggests to me transit through the upper atmosphere at a wide angle. I'm reasoning that if they tended to come straight down, then I'd see a dot, not a trail.

Re:Whats the point?

[Alsee]

I'm just not getting it: why shouldn't an asteroid skim the atmosphere?

Satellites spend months skimming the atmosphere. It's only during the last few days that any prediction on crash site is possible at all.

It doesn't matter if an asteroid comes in on a shallow slope, it's never going to spend more than seconds in the atmosphere.

It is the time spent in the unpredictable atmosphere that makes the difference. Even more importantly the effect is like compound-interest. A tiny difference at the start builds up to a huge difference over time. Days of "weather" affecting a satellite will change the crash site by thousands of miles. No matter woh well you measure the satellite, the weather is unpredictable.

The atmosphere (the general unchanging aspect) will affect the asteroid in a predictable way. Seconds worth of weather is insignifigant to an object going 3 to 6 miles per second (ten to twenty tousand mph). As long as you measure it accurately enough you can predict the path.

P.S.
The earth's gravity has an almost insignifigant but completely predicable effect on something going 10-20 thousand mph.

-

Hitting the moon

[roberto0]

Unless the rock was travelling at an enormous velocity, the moon would remain intact and any fragments sent into space from the impact would probably be burned up in Earth's atmosphere before colliding.

If the rock were going fast enough and was coming in at the correct angle, it might have provided a fantastic show for telescope aficionados. (of course, Someone would have had to seen it coming!)

I Need My Meds Now

[nickynicky9doors]

Get the editors off the Crack and into detox... You're frickn scar'n me.

Ice Shelf Collapses

Resident Evil

Child Porn

Killer Asteroids

Re:I Need My Meds Now

[Drakin]

add in the rather huge iceburg too...

Re:I Need My Meds Now

[elmegil]

But a city of ice isn't scary...oh...you meant icebErg.

Re:I Need My Meds Now

[jimmydigital]

And it's only Wednesday! Nothing good ever happens on a Wednesday...

Re:I Need My Meds Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to real life, friend. It is scary.

This is OLD news...

[ghack]

Pulitzer prize winner Dave Barry[Miami Herald] commented on this a few weeks ago:

Asteroid Nearly Destroys Earth

Books for your reading pleasure

[teamhasnoi]

This fine book is about this very thing happening (asteroid hitting earth). Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. (Both kick-ass authors) Another book by them, that is somewhat similar (aliens throwing the asteroids at us) is Footfall. Both are very good. If you don't have time to read 600 pages, here is a slightly shorter version.

Tunguska? NOT!

[tuxlove]

An impact by an asteroid of similar size to the Tunguska asteroid is not possible. Siberia was not hit by an asteroid in 1908 - it wasn't even "hit" technically. The destruction was caused by a comet.

Hunters have looked for the remains of the asteroid that hit Siberia for years, but have found nothing, and for a very good reason. Simulations have shown that the blast pattern on the Siberian landscape could only have been caused by an object moving moving at a particular angle and exploding at elevation over the ground.

Asteroids do not explode like that, but a comet would quite possibly. Made mostly of frozen liquid, the heat of atmospheric entry could cause a comet to explode as it rapidly vaporized. This would leave little or no large remains as an asteroid would, would probably not cause a crater, and would throw up less debris than an asteroid. All of this seems consistent with the Tunguska event.

I'm no expert by any means, but if an asteroid of the same size as the Siberian comet hit the earth, my guess is that it would be much more destructive and have more worldwide effect.

Re:Tunguska? NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever modded this as "flamebait" is an idiot. Please explain how this message qualifies as flamebait in any sense? I hope the metamoderators have more of a clue than you and set you straight.

Re:Tunguska? NOT!

[geekoid]

do you know what it takes to throughly search Tunguska? its mostly marsh. and trees.

An astroid can explode in the atmosphere, depending on its "structual integrity".if its cracked a certian way, the pressure ot getsexposed to as it punched through our atmosphere.

Im not saying it was or was not an astroid but,
To say, "we have no evidence it was this one thing, so we're going to say its this other thing, which we don't have evidence of" is just bad science.

Re:Tunguska? NOT!

[tuxlove]

Fair enough, I'm not an astronomer or physicist, so I'll grant that it *could* have been an asteroid. I'm quoting the dude who did the simulations (on some science show, forget which) who stated that his research indicates a comet. Perhaps he's wrong, but his explanation sure seemed far better than any of the others presented.

I would guess that an exploding asteroid wouldn't vaporize as cleanly as a comet either, which lends credence to the comet theory. In any case, I think it's pretty clear that whatever it was exploded over the earth and didn't impact, due to the blast pattern.

Re:Tunguska? NOT!

[Anonymous Coward]

If asteroid would be made of same kind of materials that are common in Tunguska area, it wouldn't have to vaporize cleanly, anyone hunting remains just wouldn't know a piece of asteroid from any other rock.

Anyway, the blast pattern isn't only theory that supports exploding in the atmosphere, second is that there is no impact crater.

wait...that was a DIFFERENT one...

[ghack]

wow! after reading the article, this one was a DIFFERENT asteroid. that makes two in a month!

And also in October-

[purduephotog]

MIT labs pointed out the miscalculation that there were MORE NEA objects than being reported.

IT's on their lab page, which was included in my submission of the story. Basically, they've come to realize there is a hell of alot more junk floating around than they've thought about.

Go figure- we haven't learned yet.

2002-03-19 13:52:31 Another near miss: Asteroid buzzes earth (science,news) (rejected)

Re:And also in October-

[Anonymous Coward]

One day you'll learn to put the word STEALTH in the title. It's the little things that take you to the top.

Re:And also in October-

[BlowCat]

2002-03-19 13:52:31 Another near miss: Asteroid buzzes earth (science,news) (rejected)
2004-08-01 15:00:12 Comet misses earth (science,news) (rejected)
2005-01-12 01:51:02 Another stealth asteroid misses earth (science,news) (rejected)
2007-12-23 23:33:58 Asteroid hits earth, wipes out civilization (science,news) (rejected)

I still have no idea why the last story was rejected.

Re:Hey Eric

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even funnier that you stalk the guy online. And who said he doesn't have the right to prevent losers, I mean, um, trolls like yourself from using his resources inappropriately?

What the hell are we going to do anyway?

[MonkeyBot]

Even if we did notice it, What are we going to do about it? Would the earth really unite together as a force to stop it? I think it would be more like "Well, an asteroid is going to hit at spot x, so if you are there, you'd better start running!" Either that, or we'd try to shatter it with a missle, break it into smaller pieces, and damage a much, much wider area. Plus, Steve Buscemi would go crazy, and Liv Tyler would cry because her father dies (but secretly she'd be happy because she'd be riding Ben Affleck's bone rollercoaster...).

Oil drillers

[Meech]

What they are not telling you is that three days ago they sent up the worlds best oil drillers and a nuclear warhead, but due to copyrighted story, they were not able to release that to the press.

I don't want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

The scary part is that scientists didn't notice it until four days AFTER it passed by.

Depends if they knew exactly where it would hit, and with enough time to evacuate the area. Otherwise, I'd rather not know.

So, what they're saying is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The sun got in our eyes."
well, that crap didn't work in little league, and it's not gonna work now.

April 9th, 2002

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your umbrella with you, it'll be raining asteroids!

Tesla was a crackpot

[October_30th]

Too bad Tesla's experiments you are referring to are pure nonsense when it comes to Physics.

I am quite sick of seeing Tesla being touted as some kind of a misunderstood genius repressed by the evil scientific community. Yeah, he was lucky and had some good ideas but the rest of his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks.

His legend still lives though because people want to believe that such groundbreaking discoveries could be made by Joe Sixpacks who pump gas for a living and have absolutely no scientific training.

Since no such thing happens in real life, of course there has to be a conspiracy. Facing the reality that studying actually pays off and some of us are smarter than the others must be too hard to face.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Anonymous Coward]

Facing the reality that studying actually pays off and some of us are smarter than the others must be too hard to face.

I'm confused about something: You don't think you're actually one the smart people, do you? That would just be too bold and insightful.

Unlike all those other people who think they are smarter than average, you reall are. Is that it?

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[andrewski]

Whoa, there. Just because Tesla hadn't recieved formal physics training is no reason to blast him. In fact, had he recieved formal training, he may never have made several of his discoveries.

Oh, and the so-called 'nonsense' that he played around with? Not only did Tesla, in all probability, create the world's first maser, but there are still a great number of his 'nonsense' patents that are classified for national security purposes.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Laser_47]

his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks

Energy out of thin air, like your AM radio?
Death rays, like your microwave?

Whatever.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[spike hay]

I am quite sick of seeing Tesla being touted as some kind of a misunderstood genius repressed by the evil scientific community. Yeah, he was lucky and had some good ideas but the rest of his ideas such as getting energy out of thin air and death rays are just bollocks.

Actualy the death rays part is not bullocks. They are developing that right now. It's not too complicated. Tesla himself actualy did conduct experiments with these rays.

Heres how they work:

You have two ultraviolet nitrogen lasers. (no need to be very large. An output of a fraction of a watt each)

You point these two UV nitrogen lasers at your intended target. The UV beams ionize the air, making it conductive. Then you shoot high-voltage
electricity down the path made by the two lasers. The two lasers and the target make a complete circuit.
If you had some time on your hands, an interest in entering the Darwin Awards, and some electrical knowledge you could do this at home. A nitrogen laser is very simple. The lasing chamber is a plexiglass cylinder filled with low pressure nitrogen. There is then just 2 foil electrodes running down the sides. The electrodes are hooked up to a very simple Blumlein circuit. It's powered by a 15 KV power supply. Unlike other lasers, nitrogen does not need mirrors or anthing like that. You can find directions on the internet.
Anyway, you could then rig up the HV electricity to shoot down the beams pretty easy.

Also, with some time and ingeniuty, you could probably get it into rifle form, powered by a 12V battery and a High Voltage power sup. designed especialy for 12V batteries. That would kick ass.

Right now they are developing somthing like this, a non-lethal stun-gun kind of weapon for cops. It will be able to shoot 2 kilometers. The reason why cops aren't already using this is that a beam weapon using nitrogen lasers would fry someone's optic nerve right quick. A half a watt of the horribly burn-o-rific wavelengh of UV light that comes out of nitrogen lasers is very bad.
They are trying to develop another type of UV laser that operates at a safer wavelength, that is not harmful. Right now, this type of laser is the size of a suitcase. They are trying to size it down to hand-held size. If my memory serves me right, the company is called HSVT, or something like that.

One more thing: The coolest thing is that these guns ionize oxygen. They would make a green glow!! Kind of like the pulse gun on UT. Another thing: These are worthless for war. All that you need to protect yourself against this weapon is a tin foil suit.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Azathoth_lca]

All that you need to protect yourself against this weapon is a tin foil suit.

How about just the hat? :)

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find directions on the internet.

Scientific American had plans for one of these. Battery powered, and using an ignition coil from a car.

They also published plans for an organic dye laser.

Check the library for back issues, these plans were published between 1975-1981.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting. I never knew you could build a deathray, especialy not at home. I think the poster should be modded up on that one.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[spike hay]

Huh, it uses battery power. Well then, that makes the rifle thing easier.

BTW, the Sciam article shows plans for a laser that uses a capicitor made with foil and pcb electronic board. The capicitor made with this setup would be a couple feet wide. Some other people's designs call for a capicitor made with garbage bag plastic and foil. I think this is a better design because it has better capacitance. Anyway, for the rifle thing, I was thinkin' you could use the plastic and foil and just kind of put it into folds to save space, so you wouldn't have a 3 foot wide rifle. (of course each fold would have to be seperated! Need to use some kind of nonconducting support.)

Also, the Sciam design is not powerful enough. It produces 60 milliwatts. There are other designs with larger lasers that can make over 500 MW. That would be enough power to ionize air.

Anyway, a rifle of this design would weigh about 3 pounds, and be 1 meter long. The power supply and battery would be carried on your back and maybe weigh 20 lbs.

Anyway, this laser thing is very dangerous. Not only the electric beam, but the capacitor. The capicitor would be charged with 15,000 volt electricity. Nothing to screw with. People have been electrocuted when building homemade lasers before.

The best site for homebuilt lasers is Sam's Laser FAQ, Here

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[spike hay]

Sorry. I screwed up. I'm doing this from memory, you see. The pcb board obviosly uses the copper already on it. I will screw my head on next time.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[juhaz]

12V battery? How is that supposed to work? Most (all?) gas lasers have HORRIBLE efficiency, combine that to the fact that dry human body is quite good resistor so unless you spray them with something like salt water first, you need to pump quite a bit of amps down the "wire" to get deadly, or even stunning effect and it would probably drain the battery so damn fast it would be pretty useless.. maybe it could work with portable fuel cell.

And it's rather strange how real science again trails after fiction, how many books or computer games we have with guns that shoot down lightning?

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[Kintanon]

You seem to have been misinformed. I don't care how badass a resistor you think you are, 2 amps will stop your heart.
It won't fry you in a spectacular fashion the way say... licking a powerline would, But you'll be just as dead.

Kintanon

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[some guy I know]

I read somewhere that a very large capacitor can be made using two rolls of aluminum foil and two rolls of waxed paper.
Layer the four rolls such that the two waxed paper layers lead the two foil layers, and the two foil layers are offset to the left and right.
Roll this up onto another tube, and you've got a very big capacitor.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[spike hay]

Yeah. The capicitor used in this laser is designed for ultra-fast discharges. Less than a millionth of a second.

Re:Tesla was a crackpot

[spike hay]

15,000 volts with some amperage is very deadly. It would definitely kill you or at least cause cardiac arrest. Any high-voltage electricity (except static, like from a Van De Graff generator) can kill you.

Do you know that if you take apart a disposable camera you can kill yourself with the flash bulb capacitor if it isn't drained? It doesn't take much power. That means, when properly transformed to a high voltage, you can kill yourself with the electricity from a AA battery!

I don't care how good a resistor you are 15,000 volts is a lot. Volts is more a measure of the resistance the electricity can take. 110 volts can jump through your body just fine, as I have found out. 15,000 volts would go through your body 100 times easier.

How many times?

[BattleTroll]

Do we have to see this same article posted here? This has to be three by my count? Can I submit it again next week and get some kudos? Thanks!

What could we do...

[miked50]

If we knew an asteroid was going to hit Earth, what could we do to stop it? IMO... not much.

Errrm, no...

[kigrwik]

Actually, that was Armageddon showing on TV.

I almost ran to the basement myself, when I saw Bruce Willis with a NASA spacesuit....

Hmm, never has my sig been more appropriate. Except, of course when that trawler caught a cow dropped from a russian cargo planel...

Re:Errrm, no...

[t_allardyce]

for once, channel 5 did something right...
What would have been funnier is if we were watching the film, as the asteroid hit in real life... i would just be laughing so hard and... um.. would die.. um.. ok. i shut up now

/.'d?????

[edrugtrader]

is it possible /. is getting /.'d right now?

jeeeeeeeeeeeezzzz

sllllllowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Hey! If it came from the Sun...

[192939495969798999]

If the rock came from the same direction as the Sun, wouldn't it cast a shadow? (One day, at Palomar observatory...) "There's a shadow over me, but there are no clouds. Oh well, I'll just go back to lookin' for space-born objects that could hit Earth NOT in the direction of the shadow."
Sir_Haxalot

Dark force

[beta21]

I thought I felt a disturbance in the force on saturday afternoon

Don't worry, be happy

[BlueArchon]

Why are everybody worried about these asteroids? The last asteroid big enough to kill people so it counts hit earth something like 65 million years ago... Those smaller asteroids keep dropping down a bit more often, but who cares? If it don't hit a major city (very unlikely, compared to the unihabited part of earth) it won't do anything... Oh yeah.. a few thounsand people might get killed, but doesn't people die in larger quantities in wars and stuff like that?

Re:Don't worry, be happy

[jakob_grimm]

You must be an optimist. (It's been 65 million years since we got hit by a big one!)

A pessimist thinks: Last one hit 65M years ago. We're overdue.

Re:Don't worry, be happy

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Blue Archon writes:

> Why are everybody worried about these asteroids? The last asteroid
> big enough to kill people so it counts hit earth something like 65
> million years ago... Those smaller asteroids keep dropping down a bit
> more often, but who cares? If it don't hit a major city (very unlikely,
> compared to the unihabited part of earth) it won't do anything...

65 million years ago? How about less than six thousand? Current theories have an asteroid or comet smashing into Iraq and destroying several bronze age cultures (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth /comet_bronzeage_011113-1.html). If the event in Siberia had happened in a heavily populated area, you bet people would have been killed. As recently as 1994 a comet broke apart and hit a planet (in this case Jupiter), causing multiple impacts. You could fit the entire planet Earth into some of the dents (since healed because Jupiter is a gas planet and cloud craters aren't as long lived as ones in rock). In fact last July a small asteroid (smaller than a car) hit a corn field in Pennsylvania. Supposedly it made popcorn. ;)

> Oh yeah.. a few thounsand people might get killed, but doesn't people
> die in larger quantities in wars and stuff like that?

Oh, show some compassion! Most of the Earth is water, drop a big enough asteroid in the water and Mr. Tsunami will come calling, with a huge wall of water that can be quite devastating. If the asteroid hits on land, and is in the nuclear range of impact, you are going to get a nice little nuclear winter, sans radiation. You get drought, dark days, cold nights, and all that dirt in the sky has to go somewhere. The one that killed the dinos 65 million years ago killed 70% of the life on this planet along with them (and guess what, those kind of asteroids come around about once every 100 million years).

We've had five major mass extinctions (including the most recent one involving the dinos), but 251 million years ago the granddaddy of them all, the Permian Extinction, wiped out 90% of all life on this planet. It may well have been caused by an asteroid or comet (http://www.cosmiverse.com/space08300105.html).

The time to think about what to do to protect ourselves (if we even can) is not four days before an asteroid is due to hit, and certainly not four days after. That time is now. Of course, it is also high time to put an end to war and terrorism.

"Lola, kindness is not enough, look for the reason of hatred and anger. When you find and understand that, love becomes the strongest power; stronger than courage or wisdom."
Belabera, "Mothra 3: King Ghidora Attacks"

What's more frightening is...

[aztektum]

It took 7 days since they did see it to get onto /.

We could all be dead by now

:(

Tunguska Website

[istartedi]

The heat incinerated herds of reindeer and charred tens of thousands of evergreens across hundreds of square moles.

I guess the comet/asteroid/whatever didn't bother to get permission from Greenpeace. Also, I bet those square moles were pissed. What did the cool moles do?

In all seriousness, how long did it take the herds to recover? Probably not that long. This certainly should put all the arguments over Alaskan drilling into perspective.

Re:Tunguska Website

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except the Tunguska asteroid went boom and then stopped making any noises. Nature has a way of reclaiming its territory. Ever seen a forest 20 years after a big fire? That's quite unlike constant drilling, exploration, construction and transportation over a period of who knows how long.

Wish

[suso]

Frankly, I wish one would hit the earth.

I keep wanting one to hit my house..

[AnalogBoy]

No more mortgage! Woohoo!

Unfortunately the chances of such a thing happening are about as slim as Slashdot having a pro-microsoft article, or a bill-gates tribute when/if he dies.

So this is a completely new one?

[wileycoyoteacme]

The article mentions the deisgnation of the asteroid as 2002 EM7. If memory serves me, asteroids and other heavenly bodies are named with the year that they were discovered. Hence, this one in 2002. But the article goes on to say that the only hope of figuring out if one will hit us is to watch its trajectory while it's not in front of the sun, and then extrapolate when it would be expected to collide.

Based on that info, is it safe to assume they had no idea this thing existed at all before it passed us? If that's true, then what's to keep them from missing all the other ones that aren't out in the open and not hiding in the sun's light?

Not that I'm bashing scientists, I have tremendous respect for these guys and I understand that some things go by undetected. At least they didn't issue it a visa after it had passed!

Are these really near misses?

[Performer Guy]

OK time for some back of the envelope math to counter the hysteria.

461,000 kilometers was the distance it missed by. The projected target area of that circle is PI*R^2 or about 667 billion square kilometers.

Radius of the Earth is around 6360 kilometers give or take. Projected target area of the Earth is therefore about 0.12 billion square kilometers. So the probability this class of object would collide with teh earth is roughly .12/667 or around 1/5600. Then IF it hit it would be more likely to do no damage than not depending on the impact zone.

Of course they don't just count objects inside the 1.2X distance to the moon, range when they scream "near miss". Inside the moon, beyond the moon, they all count for the headlines.

Excuse me for not losing any sleep.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Performer Guy]

P.S. I know it's bad probability math to post facto take the range and use that in calculations, however, it is correct to say that the chance that any future object passing within that distance would have this probability of hitting gives some simplifying assumptions. The big assumption is that theere is an even poisson distribution of events in the circular target cross section. There may not be for reasons of orbital mechanics and the gravity of the Earth skewing the results. It seems to me that these would likely work to increase the probability of a strike, unless you consider that the Earth hoovering up rocks could skew results the other way, I think when you're this close with a near miss anyway the latter effect is negligable.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[epiphani]

Radius of the Earth is around 6360 kilometers give or take. Projected target area of the Earth is therefore about 0.12 billion square kilometers. So the probability this class of object would collide with teh earth is roughly .12/667 or around 1/5600.

Sure, if space was flat. Think gravity.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Performer Guy]

See my P.S. posted before your response, apart from the caveats I posted there it is entirely reasonable to consider the 2D cross section in these calculations.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Fizyx]

No, it was a near hit. Confused? Here's a parable:

Flying home one night, a fellow looks out the window is alarmed to see the lights of a small plane headed right at him. Immediately, his own plane goes through contortions to get out of the way. The pilot comes on and apologizes that he had to avoid a near miss. The first fellow turns to his seat mate and says, "Near miss be damned. We nearly hit him!"

Near hits are fine. It's the near misses that kill.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Some Dumbass...]

Of course, we also need to take time into account, or more specifically, the rate at which events such as this occur. If a once-in-a-million-years asteroid just missed Earth by a bit, then I'm not worried either. If a fifty-times-a-year asteroid just missed Earth, then I'm worried.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Alsee]

around 1/5600

The and improved Chernobyl I-Pod, never needs batteries!
Only a 1/5600 chance* it will detonate during use.

* probability calculation based on typical use during one calendar year.

-

Re:Are these really near misses?

[mgblst]

Excuse me for not losing any sleep. Your stats, and the fact that it passed by a few days ago.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[vuo]

Given that the mass of Earth is 5.677e24 kg, the size of the asteroid is "70 km", the distance is 461000 km, it has the same density as Earth, or 5250 kg/m^3, and it is a sphere;

• Asteroid has V = (4pi/3)r^3, m = Vd.
• m = (5250 kg/m^3)(4pi/3)(70000 m)^3 = 7.543e18 kg
• Newton said F = GMm/r^2.
• F = G * 4.282e43 / (461000000 m)^2 = 1.344e16 N

This is the estimated gravitational attraction. Now let us calculate the maximum speed of the comet for Earth to "catch" it to its orbit, at that distance.

• Centripetal force F = (mv^2)/r
• GMm/r^2 = mv^2/r; GM/r = v^2;
• v = sqrt(GM/r).
• v = sqrt(G * 5.677e24 kg / 461000000 m) = 906 m/s.

The conclusion is that the comet would have had to be very slow, with a velocity less than 0.9 km/s, to hit the Earth from that distance. Usually they go ten to hundred times faster. However, the value is only 1-2 orders of magnitude away. If it went closer, Earth's gravity would at least slingshot it, if not suck it in.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[darkcompanion]

Speaking about gravity, what impact does earth's gravity have on the trajectory of that asteroid ? 1.2 times the distance to the moon is in astronomical terms _very_ close, so one would expact a significant influence on the asteroid's direction.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Conor]

It might make it clearer if you compare the Earth to the central bullseye on dartboard, which is roughly 1 cm across. In that case this asteroid would be a dart that missed by 36cm, ie it didn't even get close to hitting the board!

It is quite valid to neglect the effect of the Earth's gravity on the asteroid, as it is moving far too fast to be deflected enough to hit the earth.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[HiThere]

The probability is significantly higher than your estimate. You have neglected to consider the effects of gravity on the shape of orbits. Also, if the orbit is perturbed during one pass, then there's a higher probability that it will come closer on another pass. So the effects are cumulative (though a lot more complex than I can figure).

OTOH, an orbit perturbed by the Earth may then result in the orbit being perturbed by something else (the Sun or Jupiter, to pick the two heavies), in which case it may never again come as close.

I think of them as near misses because if the earth - moon system perturbs their orbits, the effects are too complex to calculate, but increase the likelihood of another near pass. (And that was already pretty likely!) And the damage caused by a strike! Even if it didn't do hideous damage directly, it might set off a war (if you didn't see the meteor coming, who threw that missle? And are you going to wait for a couple of astronomers to get through security to find out that nobody did? When you might not believe them anyway?

We need to see even the relatively minor ones, so that high tensions + accident don't lead to war. Among other reasons.
.

Re:Are these really near misses?

[Performer Guy]

Next time read the posts you reply to.

Is is really that close?

[sbergman2]

Here is an analogy using numbers that are more or less to scale.

Imagine a dart board 1 foot across.
Imagine a "Bullseye" area 1 inch across in the center of the dart board.
Imagine a dart sticking in the wall 2 feet to the left of the left edge dart board.

The "Bullseye" area is the earth. The dart is the asteroid.

Imagine someone saying "Gee, that was sooooo close!"

Lets move on to some real news.

Re:Is is really that close?

[david duncan scott]

Imagine a bullet passing within two feet of my tiny little head. Is that close? Yup!

Re:Is is really that close?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. On the scale of the size of your head, it would miss at about 10 meters. I really think it was aimed for someone else.

Re:Is is really that close?

[david duncan scott]

But maybe you're just not a micro-encephalic like me. :)

Seriously, though, even 10 meters is closer than most of us have had a bullet go by, and a hell of a lot closer than we'd like. Even though I live in Baltimore, I put down the paper when I hear even a distant shot. It's not so much the distance as it is the consequences, rather like the fact that a sidewalk feels perfectly safe, but most of us wouldn't use a bridge across the Grand Canyon if it were only three feet wide, with no rails.

among the 10 closest known approaches by minor pla

[john_turnbull]

New Scientist special bulletin (8th March)

Not with a 4 megaton yield

[WinPimp2K]

Or didn't you see the part where they said how much energy would have been involved if it had hit?

The US, USSR, and France have all set of bigger bombs than that and somehow failed to wipe out everything on the Pacific Rim with tsunamis.

Remember what the Bikini atoll was famous for.

Re:Not with a 4 megaton yield

[Darby]

Remember what the Bikini atoll was famous for.

Testing the affects of radiation on unsuspecting people living nearby?

Re:Not with a 4 megaton yield

[Anonymous Coward]

Testing the affects of radiation on unsuspecting people living nearby?

Oh no, we did those tests in the contiguous 48. Bikini was about testing the effects of radiation on U.S. servicemen.

asteroids

[tGOw]

omg, it's commin right for us!

btw, i wanted to yell

Post aborted
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Re:Is *tthis* really that close?

[sbergman2]

Well, I should have previewed!

The subject should be "Is *this* really that close?

And the dart should be more like 2.5 feet to the left of the left edge of the board, or 3 feet from the center.

Incomming transmission...

[ZaneMcAuley]

Zee next won will be aimed at ...

Re:Only thing a better monitoring system would do.

[rseuhs]

Actually, with a good monitoring system you could (gasp) evacuate the affected area before it hits.

Fortunately, most asteroids are not THAT big.

miss as good as a mile

[Anonymous Coward]

a miss is as good as a mile, right? Just Imagine

Asteroid 2002 EM7: "sssssssssssssssssssssssss - BOOOOM"

Us: "what the hell was THAT?"

Hmm.. Makes you think

[ktulu1115]

This is kinda scary even though we can't do sh*t about it. I mean, honestly... I know the govt spends about $2000 on a toilet seat and whatnot but you don't seriously think they'd be able to stop something this big.

Re:Only thing a better monitoring system would do.

[JordanH]

Imagine if something like this had hit near Washington DC without warning. We'd probably assume that the terrorists had a big boomer. We might have responded...

Imagine if this hit in Pakistan or India? They might assume that it was the first salvo in a Regional nuclear war and responded in kind. Tens of Millions could be dead.

Imagine if this hit in Israel...

I could go on. Best that we know when and where it's going to hit, even if we don't have any defense yet.

Better still to build up some sort of defense. I wouldn't think that a 70 Meter long rock would be that difficult to deal with. If we have sufficient warning, we might be able to alter the course of objects like these so they crash harmlessly on the Moon or into the Sun.

Monitoring would be the first step. If we had a really good handle on the objects crossing our orbit, we could then develop some plans to handle the smaller ones, working up to more elaborate plans for the larger ones. For the really big ones, perhaps we could just nudge them a little every so often so as to either greatly decrease their chances of intersection with the Earth.

SETI

[ZaneMcAuley]

Maybe SETI actually succeeded in their transmission of "ASL", and that was the response...

Frequency

[Nyarly]

Is it just that they're getting reported more often, or is the frequency of asteroids near-missing the Earth increasing?

While this sounds a little paranoid, there's a big difference between being able to see them better (or reporting them more loudly when we do) and them zipping by more often. The image I have is of some malign asteroid artillery unit ranging on the Earth, and the next (or the one after) will be the beginning of a barrage.

I'm just being a worrying nellie, right? Right?

Re:Hmm.. Makes you think

[ZaneMcAuley]

"I know the govt spends about $2000 on a toilet seat and whatnot but you don't seriously think they'd be able to stop something this big."

So what do you recommend? Larger toilet seats to deflect them? THE LARGE ARRAY TOILET SEAT DEFLECTOR SHIELDS.

Re:Hmm.. Makes you think

[ktulu1115]

So what do you recommend? Larger toilet seats to deflect them? THE LARGE ARRAY TOILET SEAT DEFLECTOR SHIELDS

Make that THE VERY LARGE ARRAY TOILET SEAT DEFLECTOR SHIELDS ;)

Re:Hmm.. Makes you think

[ZaneMcAuley]

Yeah BUT, slight design flaw, toilet seats have holes in them to let crap like that through :D

Torino Scale (used to classify collision threats)

[volpone]

If you're interested, check out nasa.gov's description of the Torino Scale , the method in which the scientific community classifies an object's likelihood of striking and damaging the Earth.

The rating goes from zero (the object is certain to miss the Earth) to ten (the nasty asteroid thingy is definitely going to "cause a global climatic catastrophe"). Read it, it's very unsettling...

Does anyone know what Torino rating this most recent near-miss was?

Post-Apocalypse News Reporting

[mpark6288]

I can imagine it now. Everyone on the planet dies, and in the great beyond (or whatever it is) a NASA guy stands on a podium: Oh, and by the way, we got hit by an asteroid. Thank you.

i bet it was..

[Profe55or Booty]

osama bin laden! really, you don't know WHAT these evil terrorists are capable of!

-greg

Came from the direction of the sun?

[guttentag]

The space boulder passed Earth within 288,000 miles (461,000 kilometers) -- or 1.2 times the distance to the moon -- on March 8, but since it came from the direction of the sun, scientists did not observe it until four days later.

In other news, President Bush has declared the sun to be part of "the axis of evil."

"My advisors have just informed me that the sun has been hurling dangerous, radiation death rays at the United States and its friends for millenia. And they have a 'solar flare' weapon they use to disrupt our electronics."

"Mark my words. We will smoke them out of their holes and wipe them off the face of the planet," Bush stated, before a reporter pointed out that the sun is not on Earth. "It don't make no difference -- don't interrupt me with the politics of details, son. We're still going to hunt them down and put a stop to them."

The president refused to answer questions about whether he plans to detain the sun in Cuba.

Re:Came from the direction of the sun?

[JordanH]

Administration advisors also believe that the Sun has developed a powerful nuclear capability.

Wake-Up Call To Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you add asteroids to your inane
"Axles of Evil"?

Thanks for nothing,
Woot_spork.

Re:Wake-Up Call To Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration

[DeltaBlaster]

Well.. Asteroids do spin on an axis ... so .. I guess it would fit :)

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[lmfr]

Metric is a decimal system and the unit used to measure distances, volumes and mass.

Strictly speaking, the "meter" is a bar in a french museum of about 3.28 feet in length.

The SI (International Standard) defines the meter as the international standard for distances, and the standards for volume and mass are directly connected to meters: 1 cm3 equals a litre, and 1 Kg equals one cm3 of water at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature of 4 C.

It's the most used system, but the old british colonies and Britain it self use a different system.

But it is the standard for the scientific community.

We need a NEAR@HOME...

[jhesse]

Hmm... A 12-inch SC telescope contained in a small roof-mounted dome with servos and a CCD hooked up to your computer. With a hundered of these, we should be able to get at least half of the sky.
Something like this, only smaller: http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/

Whaddaya think, sirs?

Re:We need a NEAR@HOME...

[AstroJetson]

Good idea but a 12 inch SCT has a field of view on the order of 1 degree (probably somewhat less). We'd need thousands not a hundred to cover the sky. That number could be reduced somewhat by limiting the search to expected asteroid and comet orbits, but still....there would have to be lots of scopes to provide decent coverage. Even so, I think this is a great idea. Even 1% of the sky is better than 0%, right? And scope time on the big boys is way too expensive for a project like this.

Re:We need a NEAR@HOME...

[jheinen]

The scope doesn't just aim at one point in the sky. You can cover a whole swath in one night. Then repeat the next night and compare the images. This can all be done automatically, and in fact the hunt for minor planets is a growing hobby with amateur astronomers. GOTO computerized scopes and CCD imaging have made it possible to do real science in your backyard.

Re:We need a NEAR@HOME...

[AstroJetson]

Yes I know.....I'm one of those people. I encourage all amateur astronomers with this capability to join in and help. I'm more into variable stars myself, which is another area where amateurs can help out the pros. My only point was that a hundred scopes isn't going to cover the sky, but still, 100 > 0.

Re:We need a NEAR@HOME...

[russh347]

"...sir, it's a big ass sky"

"We're not going to see it"

[Rick the Red]

"If one comes from the direction of the sun, we're not going to see it," Williams said.

Uh, yeah, like everything's blinded by the sun, dude, including RADAR.

Aren't you glad these guys are watching out for us?

What would have happened...

[distributed.karma]

"What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad." -- Dave Barry

Astronomical Blind Spot

[ehiris]

Great terminology.

Maybe they meant the "Oh shit we weren't looking spot"

I remember a documentary on Discovery where they were talking about how most asteroids are discovered by amateurs.

Scarry stuff

Does it really matter?

[TestBoy]

It amazes me that we have a blind spot where we can't see asteroids. I dont think it really matters if the asteroid is large enough, we will die. There is no feasible plan to redirect or destroy an asteroid that I know of. If a large enough asteroid comes, its over.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Tony Hoyle]

We have a lot of blind spots... asteroids aren't luminous - we only notice them when they're illuminated by the sun, by which time they're pretty damned close.

It's quite possible if something a couple of miles across was heading towards us we wouldn't see it until it was too late anyway.

Oh, yeah

[Faust7]

In this case, Ignorance truly is bliss.

blissblissblissblissblissblissbliss WHAM

then the insect people arise...

Drivers' Education

[KPU]

What did we learn in drivers' education? Always check your blind spot.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Strictly speaking, the "meter" is a bar in a french museum of about 3.28 feet in length.

No, that would be the "metre" =)

> 1 cm3 equals a litre

not quite.

1000 cm3 == 1 litre
1 cm3 == 1 millilitre

> 1 Kg equals one cm3 of water at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature of 4 C.

nope, 1 Kg = 1000 cm3 of water (1 litre) at standard pressure and temperature of 20C (86F)

> It's the most used system, but the old british colonies and Britain it self use a different system.

Most, if not all, of the old british colonies use the metric system.

[OT] Weird moderation!

[Hektor_Troy]

Troll=1
Funny=1

Somebody sure doesn't have a sense of humour. Moderaions should be
Troll=1 (can't change that)
Funny=4

What next? They're gonna mod down people not supporting Zhe Offize of Vaterland Zecurity?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Hey! Atlanta?

[phreakmonkey]

From the article:

"If it were over a populated area, like Atlanta, it would have basically flattened it," said Gareth Williams, associate director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Why Atlanta, huh? You Bostonians have a problem with us or somethun?!?! Shee-it, I gots neighbors with pickup trucks bigger than that damned rock anyday. Bring it on, we'll haul it off for ya!

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[lmfr]

You're right. One dm3 is a litre, not one cm3, and I wasn't sure about the 4C. Thanks for the corrections...

Umm, no

[jreilly]

Actually, we can't see anything that approaches us from the direction of the sun. That's why you hear about asteroids that miss us, but aren't seen till after the fact. Once the asteroid passes our orbit, we don't have to deal with the incredibly bright sun overpowering our optics

Re:Umm, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be possible to then have a dedicated satelite telescope or something similar to monitor that astronomical blind spot around the sun?

Or is that too large an area for that sort of thing?

Re:Umm, no

[Alexis Morissette]

Well, if we can't see it because of the sun's light, why don't we just look for it at NIGHT? Duuuuuh...

Re:Umm, no

[Fesh]

Because there's an assload of planet between your telescope and the object you're looking for?

Duuuuuh...

Money

[xX_sticky_Xx]

Yesm it is safe to assume they didn't know about this one. The main obstacle to cataloguing NEOs is a lack of funding from institutions and governments.

Ther are a lot of undetected NEOs out there and in order to have a chance at finding and plotting the orbits of most of them, governments are going to have to put resources into monitoring. This, of course, won't fly well with the "my tax dollars" whiners because they will only see it as a waste of money. I doubt they would see it that way if a 1km asteroid smacked the earth though ;).

Re:Money

[wileycoyoteacme]

You're absolutely right about the money factor, although I don't know if I could squarely place the blame on the whiners. (Although, yes, they are a huge factor!) Every time I drive down the highway, I can't help but laugh at the "Your tax dollars at work" repair signs, yet the construction project has been dragging on for years, without so much as a construction crew parked on site.

Scaring people into buying into the idea probably won't work either... perhaps there's some way to tie in sattelite dishes with some sort of distributed computing mechanism, a-la Seti@home. I know that I wouldn't mind contributing unused cycles to sleep a little better at night :)

Australian Skies

[skware]

Aint it great how in 1996 the aussie government withdrew all funds from a asteroid mapping program.

This pretty much leaves noone gaurding the southern skies.

There was a story on this on 60 minutes (aussie version) 3 days ago. A transcript of it can be found at http://news.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/20 02_03_17/story_531.asp

Some Perspective

[Militant Apathy]

1.2 Lunar diameters is not the relevant number here. 288,000 miles is 72 Earth radii.

That means that if you draw a circle around the Earth with a radius at the distance of closest approach, the Earth's cross-sectional area fits into that circle 5,200 times.

In other words, even if someone were heaving rocks at us at distances this close or closer at a rate of one per year (a grotesque overestimate), we would expect to get hit once every five millenia or so, neglecting gravitational attraction effects (which don't contribute much).

As "near misses" go, that's not so near. The Earth isn't that big a target. This is a nice frothy story for CNN, especially the "blind side" angle, but not a great reason to start repenting sins.

Can't really blame the scientists

[LrdZombie]

Well, to be fair to the scientists, all their mothers told them not to stare at the sun, so can we really blame them for not seeing it?

and i say again..

[bo0push3r]

who is really surprised by this? it's not that we're being suddenly bombarded by these interstellar missiles. we just have technology that can detect them now..

go back to your gilmore girls, this is just a drill.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Chep]

No, the metre is a unit of length equal to the length of the travel of light in vacuum during 1/299792458th of second.

(the second being the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental state of the atom of Cesium-133. Phew)

1 litre is 1 dm^3, not cm^3;

1 kg is the mass of the iridated platinum prototype, stored in the International Bureau for Weights and Measures, located a couple kilometres out of Paris, France.

(indeed, liquid water has a density of approximately 1 kg/litre in the standard conditions. )

This has been beaten to death and is pretty well documented in the wikipedia or any other reference work, isn't it ?

Launch on Response

[Anonymous Coward]

The nuclear arms of the US and the Russian Confederation are now in a "Launch of Response" configuration which is a step back from "Launch on Ready." The practical result of this status is that the respective Presidents have less time to decide whether or not a percieved event is a first strike. IIRC for russia, that means about 10 minutes from detecting a missile launch (in order to guarantee a 'sufficient' counterstrike). We've come pretty damn close to anihilation before. In the mid nineties, a Finnish research rocket almost triggered WWWIII (Boris Yeltsin chose not to launch a response, despite the fact that the Russian military could not be sure they were not seeing a first strike). This is scary, what's even scarier is that the Finns told the Russians to expect a rocket launch!

I found this info in a Scientifica American article: Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert, November 1997.

Is Russia's satelite and observation network functioning properly? They can't even pay their soldiers reliably (though they seem to be feeding them all these days). Do you think they'll be able to tell the difference if a rock lands anywhere near anything 'strategic' on Russian territory?

Let's improve our detection technology now.

Of course, the nuclear weapons are the real problem and we need to get away from the insane "Launch on Response" posture.

Re:Launch on Response

[Anonymous Coward]

a Finnish research rocket almost triggered WWWII

Actually that was a Norwegian rocket, launched from Andøya, and heading northward.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Other has pointed out some problem in your post.

Bar are not exact enough. So today the meter is defined by the distance light travesl in 1 second diveded by a very large numer (which happens to the same number that defines how many meter the light travels in one second).

Ain't it amazing :-)

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

"but the old british colonies and Britain it self use a different system. "

Here in Australia we've been metric for twenty years.

Nobody cares if the Asteroid Misses.

[rapidweather]

A couple of years ago one of these cropped up, and the Pentagon held a mid-morning news conference, saying that an asteroid would pass very close to the earth, within the distance to the moon or so. Gee, I thought that was very close, and agreed entirely with the Pentagon, on their decision to alert the public. I told the folks at work, and since they were mostly a bunch of twenty-somethings that don't have to worry about DEATH yet, I got no respect, no attention, nothing at all. It was as if "Nobody cares if the Asteroid Misses." It's all in the words you drop in the conversation. Names of Presidents, zero. Names of rap-stars, zero. Anything YOU have to say, zero. They were right, you know, in not paying attention to mine, and the Pentagon's announcement of Impending Doom. A couple of days later, the calculations on the near miss were redone, and oops, they were WAY off. No chance of any collision between the Asteroid and Earth. See? Twenty-Somethings are always right when they ignore whatever you have to say.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[lmfr]

"No, the metre is a unit of length equal to the length of the travel of light in vacuum during 1/299792458th of second."

Yes, and the speed of light is also mesaured relatively to metres...

Anyway, I'm sorry for my errors...

no scientific training???

[Edmund Blackadder]

I am pretty certain that tesla studied physics or engineering in austria (i may be wrong about the country). thats where he invented his electric motor.

By the way he never hoped to get energy out of nothing. He was trying to put energy in an resonating EM wave inside the earth, and get it back from the earth's surface.

Tesla was a genius understood or not. Electricity as we know it and use it today is based on two tesla inventions - the modern electrical motor which is used to make all electricity (with minor exceptions) and for most moving electrical things; the second one was communication by em waves (radio).

Re:no scientific training???

[xtal]

Tesla was Hungarian. He was a brilliant student. Read some books on his life. You have to remember electricity was not understood the way it is now in Tesla's day - he visualized in his head what the waves did, how the electric and magnetic fields interacted. There WAS no formal training in electricity! People thought that an AC motor was impossible - Tesla INVENTED that. The man was a brilliant genius, and largely understood. He is amoung the few engineers to have a unit named after him, the Tesla (Magnetic Field Intensity, equal to 10k Gauss IIRC).

Unlike Edison, Tesla actually had a clue about the physics of what he was doing. He was also doing some experiments on the MegaWatt (IIRC) level in New York at that point in time. For you "pull energy out of air" people, that's what a radio does. He is also on record as saying that a free source of energy would probably be a very, very bad thing for the future of man. I forget the exact quote.

And if you happen to use one of those links...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll be funding teamhasnoi's dark purposes!

Re:And if you happen to use one of those links...

[teamhasnoi]

None of them are in any way connected to me - except that I am secretly the proxy clone of Larry & Jerry. Whooohhaaaha. ha.

An opportunity!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it pierced the atmosphere, the approximately 70-meter-long rock could have disintegrated and unleashed the energy equivalent of a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, researchers said"

If only we could harness this energy we could rid the world of pollution.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Chep]

No, it's the other way around. Nowadays, the speed of light is the gauge, and the metre is the artifact. It's just that every sane person roughly knows how much a metre is (1 yd is a reasonible approximation with the level of "roughly" I use hee), so telling that speed travels 299792458 metres in a second generares an immediate "wow, that's fast" reaction to people.

The current definition has been made so that it could still be possible to know what a metre is, even if the original platinum bar was destroyed; it exploits the fact that the specific behaviour of Cesium-133 and the speed of light in vacuum are universal constants, independent of whether the Pavillon de Bagatelle receives a 10 Mt nuke on it or not.

(I don't have hard facts on that, but I would not be surprised to hear that there is research right now on replacing the definition of the kg by some reference to cleverly chosen universal constants. This must be a non-trivial subject...)

Less likely target.

[neoevans]

I know we watch about 1% of the night-sky for in-bound meteors/comets/etc... which may run the risk of colliding with the Earth, but do we watch the sky for object which could destroy the moon?

I know it's extremely unlikely but, what would happen if the moon were suddenly destroyed? Wouldn't that be nearly as bad as a direct hit with the Earth?

Think about it; no tidal pull to dictate the oceans would mean a serious disruption to the weather systems, possibly even the planet's rotation! I would think a direct hit could be almost a good thing by comparison. After all, it would mean no more BS like this...

Re:Less likely target.

[belg4mit]

Not to mention the detritus from such an impact.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[npietraniec]

It was found recently that the speed of light of light probably isn't constant... And yes, I'm sure there are better articles out there. That was a result of a quick google search.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Chep]

... interesting ...

That will, I'm pretty sure, find a solution, if that is indeed a problem. Like, determining which factors influence the speed of light, and adding subclauses fixing the "standard conditions" under which the speed of light shall be measured (or the other way around) (if the condition in question "Age of the Universe", I don't have an easy way to fix that...).

what if were over seattle

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it were over a populated area, like Atlanta, it would have basically flattened it"

I wonder what if it were over seattle, it would have flattened the microsoft, So linux can rule the world.

--LinuxPRO

fa!

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many near misses every year, it's a wonder some of these Slashdotters don't lose their grip entirely.

If it HAD whacked a city--biggest conspiracy ever!

[coltrane679]

Just imagine, especially given our current times, that this thing really did blindside a population center. Sure, rather quickly, the true, official explanation would be given out--and almost certainly vast numbers of people would believe otherwise. Undoubtedly the two most popular theories would be terrorists or a Pentagon accident. It would be the biggest, greenest, goddamnest grassy knoll of all time--it would put to shame all those lame 9/11 conspiracy theories (like this one: http://www.public-action.com/911/bumble.html).

Funding for asteroid spotters

[bunratty]

I expect funding for astronomers who want to spot asteroids and figure out how to deflect those that are headed for Earth won't come until an asteroid actually hits us. We didn't get real airport security until after 9/11, after all...

"Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth Entirely...

[MattGWU]

...Air Force Cancels Project"

In a news confrence today top US Air Force brass announced the cancellation of Project Stealth Space Rock o' Death, when the initial test of the ten year, $100 billion project failed.

"We are very dissapointed with the recent failure", an unnamed scientist told reporters today at a press confrence held at an Arlington, Virginia-area Denny's, "the damn thing just missed...it was kind of a one-shot deal, you know? We're all pretty bummed around the office."

The Stealth Asteroid was to capitalize on the success of the Stealth Bomber. "After the Gulf War, we were trying to figure out what other stealth things we could build. We were kicking stuff around the table, and somebody, I think Steve said stealth asteroid. I don't know if he was kidding or what, but we went ahead with it." The Stealth Asteroid was to be a weapon similar in theory to the Stealth Bomber, but different in a number of key areas. "First of all...it's not a plane. That's a big difference right there. Second, it would show up on the enemy radar at some point. Kind of a moot point, I guess...what would they do? Shoot at it? Maybe open an umbrella like in the cartoons. They'd be pretty boned......suckers."

While nothing is being admitted, it was widely believed that the first test of this new weapons platform would also be its first use in combat, especially against targets in reinforced bunkers, buildings, yurts, or anywhere within a 15-mile radius of the impact zone.

In other news, the Pentagon has announced the beginning of "Project Stealth Solar Super-flare".

Got change for 10 million people?

[Sloppy]

Unfortunately, convincing the other side's troops that we hadn't developed some sort of new superweapon might be another story.

For some reason, this reminds me of the Nuclear War card game, where you just described a secret project card and a propaganda card.

Re:Torino Scale (used to classify collision threat

[adminispheroid]

Yes. Zero.

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, unless it came down in DC --- then it would be just sorta funny.

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because Cheney is still holed up in some bunker elsewhere like a slimey lil coward. And don't forget Bush's shadow gummint... oooh...

Moon is going away

[e144539]

We are loosing the moon.

The current rate at which the Earth day is increasing is 0.0018 seconds/century. The semi-major axis of the lunar orbit is increasing by 3.8 centimeters/year according to laser ranging measurements made since the 1970's using the Apollo 'corner cube reflectors' deposited on the surface by the astronauts. It is expected that in 15 billion years, the orbit will stabilize at 1.6 times its present size, and the Earth day will be 55 days long equal to the time it will take the Moon to orbit the Earth. Of course, in less than 6 billion years, the Sun will have evolved into a red giant star and engulfed the Earth-Moon system, thereby incinerating it!

I haven't done any statistical calculations, but I think the earth would catch anything big enough to change the moon's orbit significantly.
Even if the moon happened to get in the middle some how, then its more likely that the moon would eventually end up hitting the earth than 'flying off' into space anyway.

BTW, The moon has little to do with the weather, the oceans would still circulate without tidal forces. On the bright side, without the moon, there wouldn't be very many earthquakes or volcanos.

Re:Moon is going away

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there would be as many earthquakes and volcanos as ever before. Those are not determined by the presence of the moon's gravitational pull.
Duh.

We're sitting on a big ball of molten iron and various other minerals and metals. (Magma, you know) Since that process is still very much active, it causes internal flows in the earth core. Those flows causes the tectonic plates on the surface to flow around, causing quakes and volcanos. Pretty much like your steamed milk flowing around on top of your espresso when you stir it.

The moon has not mass near enough to make a difference.

George Carlin

[Anonymous Coward]

Great routine, Carlin has.

Bystander: "Oh, look. They nearly missed."

But what if it hits the hills?

[hal9000]

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2002 EM7 could smack into Earth in 2093.
But don't tell the grandchildren to head to the hills just yet...

I wasn't going to. They'd be waiting in the hills for 91 years, by which time they'd have their own grandchildren to warn!

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Britain has been metricated for ages

Dudes What about the Moon?

[kanada]

The article said the meteor was 1.2 time the distance from the earth as the moon. I wonder what'd happen if a meteor hit the moon.
Now That'd Be Interesting.

Re:Dudes What about the Moon?

[zardor]

See here for a 'interesting' lunar meteor impact report, caught on video.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[juhaz]

_Probably_? you have any facts to support your claim? And no, _one_ nutcace "scientist", who, by the article, is very likely one of those horrible YEC cre(a)ti(o)nists who have to try to invent most stupid theories imaginable to support their childs tale of earth being young.

You can say "probably" when most of the physicists believe this, which is not going to happen, any time soon, probably never.

Instant ring system!

[Anarchofascist]

What would happen if an asteroid of a given size hit the moon?

The best possible outcome would be that the moon would shatter into a billion pieces and Earth would get a ring system like Saturn! Saturn's rings are apparently only about a hundred million years old, and probably created out of a collision between two moons.

Also we would get pretty much constant meteor showers for the next few hundred years... I really can't see a down-side! [fx: whispers from offstage] Oh yeah, millions of people will probably be killed by falling pieces of moon, with tsunamis, fireballs, massive explosions etc. but that's okay, we regenerate millions of people every few months. It'd be worth it for the light show.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[dylan_-]

Read this.

Don't post when you don't know what you're talking about. You could at least have read the article before you started with your "horrible YEC creationists" rubbish.

Sorry guys but it doesn't sound like him

[nusuth]

You see, the sun really has powerful nuclear capability and solar flare thing that disrupts electronics, that is not Bush like at all.

What are we waiting for?

[new death barbie]

"...The odds of a collision are currently 1 in 10 million and could become even more remote with more refined calculations."

Well, what are we waiting for? For God's sake, people, let's get calculating! And be refined about it -- hold your pencil with your pinkie finger up, or something...

If we all get together, surely we can calculate the odds right down to zero!

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most, if not all, of the old british colonies use the metric system.

Britain uses the metric system... officially. Most actual british people use this kind of confused mix of metric and imperial mesures.

Reality Imitating Art

[thelenm]

Oh, it's just another case of reality imitating art. The asteroid probably saw "Deep Impact" or "Armageddon" a few too many times and got wacky ideas in its head about smashing into Earth.

Re:Torino Scale (used to classify collision threat

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientific community uses probability of collision (a number between 0 and 1) and impact energy (megatons of TNT) to report on possible impacts. Only half-geeks like you think that a scale is cool and/or needed.

Re:Read by O'Brien

[charon_on_acheron]

God, at first glance I thought you said the book was written by Conan O'Brian. That would have made it a whole new experience.

Re:It seems like (That's Good)

[oldstrat]

The more near misses I hear about the better I feel.
The one that is really going to bug me is that last one that I'll never hear about... The big one that hits.

he wasnt hungarian

[Edmund Blackadder]

he was a Serb.

There is a problem with simulations like that

[Edmund Blackadder]

The problem is that they already know the answer when making the simulation.

Simulations can only be based on certain assumptions about the way things work in the world. Once you already have the answer you can easily mold the assumtions in a way that neatly fits the answer.

The explosion may have been caused by a comet but i dont consider those simulations really convincing proof.

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[npietraniec]

I said the article was the result of a quick google search... This has been a somewhat highly published claim over the past year or so and has created quite a stir in the scientific community...

You can say "probably" when most of the physicists believe this, which is not going to happen, any time soon, probably never.

That's an enlightened view, I imagine they said the same thing when it was proposed that the world isn't actually the center of the universe. You didn't even read the article did you?

Re:Actually... Whats a Metric Unit?

[juhaz]

That's an enlightened view, I imagine they said the same thing when it was proposed that the world isn't actually the center of the universe. You didn't even read the article did you?

I _DID_ read the article, the article that didn't have even ONE reference, it did say that _ONE_ professor believes that, did not any reasons or evidence why the said professor believes it nor have I seen anything about it after since, and it was over two years old (actually over ten years old), and seems like nothing reasonable has become of it, or the "simple google search" would find dozens and dozens of more hits... even after that google search and reading dozens of more articles, still nothing concrete, just piece of text that says that one man somewhere in Canada believes speed of light isn't a constant.

Sure it's not very wise to believe that nothing will ever change, but it's certainly not very wise to believe any theory out there just because it exists, either. Anyone can give me crapload of hard evidence that the world isn't the center of the Universe, Moffat doesn't seem to have anything to give except his opinion.