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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.
Now I'll really get to live to see the HURD released...
[ducks]
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.
Nosce te Ipsum
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?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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")
(This Space For Rent)
...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!
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.
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.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
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.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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
If we could just get the calculations more refined, then the asteroids will never hit us.
if governments would listen to scientists who are interested in preserving the human race, instead of businesses that are interested in enslaving it.
If you do the precise calculation, you find that it couldn't have hit, because it missed!
;-)
Strange that
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That is where I keep all my stuff....
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.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.
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?
..is tell us when we're all going to die.
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.
You, my friend, are management material! You will be promoted shortly. Well done.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
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.
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!)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
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"..
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Get the editors off the Crack and into detox... You're frickn scar'n me.
Ice Shelf Collapses
Resident Evil
Child Porn
Killer Asteroids
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Pulitzer prize winner Dave Barry[Miami Herald] commented on this a few weeks ago:
Asteroid Nearly Destroys Earth
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Frankly, I wish one would hit the earth.
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.
OK time for some back of the envelope math to counter the hysteria.
.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.
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
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.
His point, which you seem to have missed, is that there is clearly someone out there pelting us with rocks and garbage.
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.
-- LINUS TORVALDS, (cnn): Because their operating systems (Windows) really suck.
Fortunately, most asteroids are not THAT big.
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.
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?
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
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?
Imagine a bullet passing within two feet of my tiny little head. Is that close? Yup!
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
No. "Giant Stealth Asteroid Hits Earth And Nobody Notices Until 5 Days Later" - that would be a big headline ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"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.
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).
I stole this Sig
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?
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Uh, yeah, like everything's blinded by the sun, dude, including RADAR.
Aren't you glad these guys are watching out for us?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
"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
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
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!
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
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
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
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.
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
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.)
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
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?
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.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Maybe if it hit somewhere that nobody would miss.... Belgium perhaps?
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.
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).
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.
I have a strong belief in the Second Amendment.
Well, if we can't see it because of the sun's light, why don't we just look for it at NIGHT? Duuuuuh...
This is a special excite
This
Because there's an assload of planet between your telescope and the object you're looking for?
Duuuuuh...
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
...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".
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Yes. Zero.
Blue Archon writes:
h /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. ;)
> 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/planeteart
> 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"
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.
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?
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?
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.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
You see, the sun really has powerful nuclear capability and solar flare thing that disrupts electronics, that is not Bush like at all.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Bruce Willis is too chicken to fly in an aeroplane, if you threatened to send him in a shuttle he'd probably shit himself!
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
he was a Serb.
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.
Yeah. The capicitor used in this laser is designed for ultra-fast discharges. Less than a millionth of a second.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.