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Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth

Posted by timothy on from the they're-sneaky-like-that dept.

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.

10 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. ELE by crumbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. The world could be a better place... by teamhasnoi · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  3. Not that hard to believe. by guamman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Whats the point? by red5 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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?
    --
    I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
    1. Re:Whats the point? by david+duncan+scott · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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!"

      --

      This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander

  5. Re:Thanks for picking on us, CNN... by curunir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
  6. Are these really near misses? by Performer+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Are these really near misses? by Performer+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Are these really near misses? by epiphani · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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.

      --
      .
    3. Re:Are these really near misses? by Some+Dumbass... · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.