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120,000 km Is Still Too Close
texchanchan writes: "BBC report: '...on 14 June, an asteroid (maybe as big as 120 meters in diameter)... made one of the closest-ever recorded approaches to the Earth.
..' but was only discovered three days later. This is well within the moon's orbit. 'If 2002MN had hit the Earth, it would have caused local devastation similar to that which occurred in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908...'"
Without Tunguska, what would we compare these things to? Krakatoa?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Then again surely other nations should have their own programs in place to detect this sort of thing? I am not saying the US is right their choice, just that they aren't the only nation with a space program, not doing anything about this.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And I would like to thank the government of Australia, who, unlike the US, completely cancelled anything and everything remotely related to asteroid research.
If it happens very infrequently,
and you cant do anything about,
and cant really see it,
you just waste a lot of mental energy.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
1. What would we have done if found out 1 month before it passed by Earth? Send Bruce Willis out to blow it up with a nuclear bomb? Get a really big pool cue and bank shot it off Mars?
2. Why can't Europe get off its butt and save mankind for change? Why is it always the taxpayers of the United States that have to save the Earth? We did enough in the 20th Century. Its time for us to take a century and let France save the Earth for a change. God knows we saved their asses enough.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
1. What would we have done if found out 1 month before it passed by Earth? Send Bruce Willis out to blow it up with a nuclear bomb? Get a really big pool cue and bank shot it off Mars?
This particular asteroid wouldn't have been the end of the world, only a section of it. If it had been on a collision course with a populated area and we detected it, people could have been evacuated.No politician will spend the money on this until it's already too late. No amount of lobbying is going to change this, and the amount of money isn't even that large. IIRC some of the projects were only looking for a few million dollars. You don't need hordes of astronomers - you just need the automated equipment to locate and track asteroids in the sky. Much of the technology already exists, projects like NEAT and others have been very successful.
Until there is a major loss of life due to an impact, there isn't going to be an research. Just hope that you're not under it, that it's not mistaken for an "act of terrorism", triggering a thermonuclear war, and that it's not much bigger than a hundred meters or so, like this one. Unless, of course, you're willing to live like a pauper and do the work yourself. I'm not.
There really is little you can do. So don't worry about it. The odds aren't really that high, but you don't know when your number is going to come up, either. Hopefully China will put a base on the moon and play "mine's bigger than yours" to everyone's benefit.
Makes you wonder if all the hoopla surrounding SETI; all that computing power; and all that money might be better spent scanning the night sky for dark blobs that might end life HERE as opposed to looking for little green men on hopelessly far away stars.
..don't panic
That a rock in space detected as an asteroid is part of a bigger cluster?
The earth is 12,000km in diameter (approximately). The asteriod is 120m in diameter and passed within 120,000km of earth. Working in just two dimensions because that's how the earth will appear as a target to the passing asteroid, then:
1) "surface area" of the earth is:
A = pi * r^2 = 3.14 * 6,000^2 = 110,000,000 square kilometers
2) The area within the 120,000km radius is:
A = pi * r^2 = 3.14 * 60,000^2 = 11,000,000,000 square kilometers
3) The area of the asteroid is in practice infinitesimal compared with either of these measurements.
So to some approximation, the chances of the asteroid hitting earth if it travels within 120,000 km of the planet is:
110,000,000/11,000,000,000 = 0.01 = 1%
This is certainly not a zero probability, but it is still pretty small.
Of course this ignores a lot of factors, including the Earth's gravity well and the relative vectors of the two objects. A real calculation would reveal different probabilities.
But even when one of these asteroids passes this close - which is only known to have happened 6 times since we've been able to record these events (about 50 years?) - there is still only about a 1 in 100 chance it will hit the planet.
I'm going to be worrying a lot more about travelling on the highway than I am about asteroid collisions.
Sailing over the event horizon
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Uh, excuse me? Evcuate an area the size of Siberia? Where are you going to put millions and millions of refuges. When an asteroid hits the Earth, you don't try to figure out who to get out of the way, you start praying to your favorite deity. There would be no way we could move all the folks. Just look at what happens in Florida when they have Hurricanes and try to evacuate folks.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Check out British lives lost, as a percentage of population, in the World Wars, vs. American lives lost as a percentage of population. And then come back and tell me about the British "high horse." The sacrifices Britain made in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (note that the Americans weren't even involved until 1917 and 1941, respectively) are really mind-boggling.
(If you want to talk absolute loss of life, of course, the Russians have the UK, the US, and everyone else put together beat.)
And yes, I'm an American. And a veteran. I'm proud of my service (including Desert Storm) and I certainly don't want to minimize the American contribution to winning the World Wars. But to imply that we were the sole factor in "saving Europe" is ahistorical nonsense.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
OK, I think we've all seen/read/heard the theories of what would happen if a large asteroid hit Earth, but what if a giant asteroid hit the moon?
How big would it have to be to knock the moon from its orbit? Or even alter the moon's orbit at all? And if so, what impact on our environment here would it have? If we had no moon, no tides, etc., what would that do to earth life?
But an asteroid this size will only affect the size of a large city. There is plenty of time to evacuate the area, assuming you have a day's notice or more. If it hit the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't be a big deal.
The other major concern. If this asteroid hit a nuclear capable country (and there are quite a few of them), if there was no prior knowledge of the hit it would be very easy to confuse a meteor stike with a nuclear attack. You would have the miles of devastation and the mushroom cloud. Imagine if it were to hit india or pakistan right now. The other side might retalliate from the perceived attack before they ever figured out it was just a meteor. The only difference would be the lack of radioactive fallout.
Even in the US, where we have suffienent technology to quickly detect and determine what is going on, it still took us half a day to get a grip on what was happening on September 11. All day long there were car bombs going off that didn't exist. The Vice President ordered a plane shot down that didn't exist. And 9/11, as tragic as it was, would be insignificant compared to the type of disaster that a 120 meter rock would cause, especially if it hit a populated area.
Knowing that Washington DC was going to get wiped off the face of the planet by a meteor (literally) 6 hours before it happened would cause a lot of panic, but it would save a lot of after the fact confusion. We would be mounting rescue efforts instead of mounting for a nuclear response against an unknown enemy.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Did they ever say how those bugs were shooting the asteroids?
I have never read the book -- I only saw the movie. I, too, was a bit baffled at this. However, I remember reading a very interesting letter to the editor in the LA Times when this movie came out. His claim was that all the critics who were blasting the movie as a violent fantasy were missing the "real point" of the movie -- that it was an anti-war film. In the movie, there never was any explanation for how these bugs were supposedly launching and steering these asteroids towards Earth. In fact when you first see Klendathu you see the bugs possess no technology. Yet, all that was needed was for the leaders to claim the bugs did it and everyone was willing to go to war with them. The author of this letter was pointing out that this same kind of mindless acceptance of a convienient scapegoat was the same stuff that the director (a German) saw first-hand growing up in Nazi Germany. To further hammer the point home, director Verhoeven peppered the film full of rediculous propaganda commericals.
That letter made me look at that movie from a different perspective. It is chilling that in the film, no one questions whether the bugs were even capable, let alone willing, to commit such an act of aggression against Earth. I'm sure we can all think of examples here on Earth of peoples being too eager to go to war without a good reason.
GMD
watch this
Do yourself a favor and think about it. Scary stuff this may be, but how is it news?? Enlighten me.
What's in a Sig?
You're correct in general that HST (and radio telescopes) are the only ways to looking dayward. But in this case, they talk about the asteroid approaching basically from the Sun-direction. HST isn't allowed to be pointed near the Sun. Mercury has never been observed by HST, for example, for this very reason. Even if HST were slewed to this alignment, I seem to recall that it would automatically shut its door and go into safe mode. (There are ways that this can be overridden, of course. But that they'd risk slamming the door and safing the telescope tells you how seriously they take not looking near the Sun.)
What's worse is that even if you could avoid the Sun and look for such an asteroid, you'd still have a devil of a time. Asteroids are faint to start with, and anything near the Sun-Earth line would be showeing a small crescent phase. So the bugger wouldn't be very bright at all.
If it had been on a collision course with a populated area and we detected it, people could have been evacuated.
Interesting thought but, I'm not sure we'd even know what hemishphere to evacuate.
Recall the pondering and headscratching that goes on whenever one of our larger satellites' orbit decays. The speculation on where it will come down would be downright amusing if it weren't so serious.
Any astrophysisists out there know how well we could calculate the impact area?
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
I concur that there is "some probability" (though I disagree with another reply who suggests the probability is not miniscule... I believe it is and since there is no hard data on these events nor is miniscule a terribly meaningful hard classification, it is utterly pointless to use that classification) that something will occur as a consequence of some random bit of interstellar flotsam or jetsam slamming into the planet.
On the other hand, what consequences? The worst that we are aware of was an ice age that screwed the dinos. (possibly)
And it seems our unevolved ancestors survived. If we can't survive the same (as a species, I don't mean as individuals), then we sure haven't evolved in the right direction.
The second worst I can think of is Tunguska. Did the world stop when that happened? Did even the nation state it occured in collapse? No and No. Would it suck to see Ottawa, Toronto (well maybe not so much), Washington, Chicago, or Paris blown off the map? Yes, yes it would. But would it bring the world to an end? Probably not. Would it kill off mankind? Probably not.
Would there be consequences? Hard to see how extensive. Tunguska didn't cause a war. And anyplace that got smoked by a rock would get a huge rescue effort from the rest of the globe. Not much consolation if you live there, but still helpful in rebuilding and saving those that could be saved around the edges.
Then, step a step further out and say: What can we do to stop it? If something the size of Texas comes for us, I doubt we can shoot it down, or that it would do that much good. If something smaller comes, odds go up. But we are not even accurately tracking all this debris!
And once you pass a certain low-end threshold, it isn't worth addressing - it'll either burn up or the hole it will punch into the planet isn't large enough to (globally) be concerned about.
OTOH, what will it cost us to address rocks the size of Texas? Answer: a big damn checkbook and very damn deep pockets. We're staggering even trying to get a not-so-useful, scaled-back, quickly-probably-obsolescent space station up and that's an effort (of a sort) of the international community!.
OTOH, we've got a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, the refief of Africa, peacekeeping and peacemaking all over the globe, a global aids crisis, the funding of new biotech that could save many many lives, etc.
All of things can make valid claims on our time and effort. Should we spend the money where we're pretty sure it can be immediately beneficial and life saving, or throw it at something we're a long way from being able to handle? We've laboured in ignorance for thousands of years, another hundred probably won't matter a lot. And maybe by then, with other tech advancements, the cost of attacking the problem will drop.
I'm not entirely saying there is no risk. I'm saying the cost of addressing it EFFECTUALLY is very high. That same money can far more beneficially be expended dealing with other terrestrial crises. At some point down the road, the problem will be more cost effective to deal with, and hopefully a few more key crises will have been put to rest on Earth allowing us to focus more of our attention on these external potential problems.
Of course, a rock could drop on me tonight. If so, unless it was the size of Texas, most of the universe would just keep on ticking. And I wouldn't be around to care.
Then again, once you hit karma cap, what's the point in living anymore? *grin*
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
You know what would be ironic? If a good size asteroid hit the Earth, enough to kill millions of people but not billions, say, and that explosion mistakenly triggered a Russian nuclear attack on the U.S., and then the U.S. responded, and all the combined nuclear weapons and asteroid damage wiped everything out. In addition to being ironic, it would suck.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
RADAR would NOT be an effective means of detecting an incoming asteroid. First off, it would require too much energy to emit a RADAR pulse that could detect an object that far out. Secondly, the dish has to wait for the signal to come back, which takes a decent amount of time. Therefor, it would require a LOT of dishes to scan the sky 100% of the time. Unless you guys want to pave teh world and install dishes EVERYWHERE. Telescopes could potentially work as well, but in order to get the resolution necessary to detect these things, it would again require WAY more telescopes then we have space for. Sure, we could put then in space, but there is already enough junk up there, and we would never again be able to launch through an array of detectors to get off this god-forsaken planet. Personally, I think our best bet it to hope that nothing of major size hits us any time soon. What, is it every 10 Million years an object of substantial size hits us... I personally dont think we will a.) still be alive or b.) still be on this planet the next time something big strikes.
To dispel anyones concept of something big hitting the moon... When's the last time you looked at the moon. See those craters? Neil Armstrong didnt dig those during his stay. Those are from hits. THe only reason we dont have them on earth is because of erosion and such.
Something else to consider. 75% of the earth is covered by the ocean (give or take). The chances of one hitting land is not great. What percentage of landmass do you think is populated, or if it is, heavily populated? Not a whole lot. I would venture to say less then 5%.
Another myth to dispel. The meteor would NOT accelerate due to gravity imposed by earth. Ever hear of air friction. By the time the damn thing hit the earth, a GOOD chunk would have burned away. The lower the angle of entry, the more it burns away. Also, if it came in at a low enough angle, it would bounce off the atmosphere.
So, in review... even if a body comes within our "airspace", the chances of it doing any REAL damage are pretty slim. So, quit your bitching. You have a better chance or getting struck by lightning, or better yet... winning the lottery.