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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
...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.
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.
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!"Just remember, every Asteroid is a potential "Britney killer", and should be viewed as such.
I can't live without my Britney Spears.
That is where I keep all my stuff....
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?
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.
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.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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
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.
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.
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!
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
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.
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.)
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?
"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.
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!
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.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
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 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
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.