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120,000 km Is Still Too Close

Posted by timothy on from the ha-ha-missed-again dept.

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...'"

15 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. If a giant asteroid is going to hit me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    And they only have a matter of days/hours to prepare, I'd rather now know. Just let it and let me in die.

  2. U.S. Govt by sheepab · · Score: 3, Interesting

    but was only discovered three days later.

    Id like to thank the United States government for CUTTING BACK funds to search for stuff like this. I think currently we map 5% of the skies? No wonder it was discovered 3 days later, it was in the other 95% of the skies we dont have enough money to look at.

    --


    In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
    1. Re:U.S. Govt by FreeUser · · Score: 3, Interesting
      My favorite quote is from Dr. David Morrison

      Only a few astronomers are engaged in the search for potentially threatening comets and asteroids, in fact the total number of people working on this problem is less than the staff of one McDonalds

      This, even more than the annoying and useless nature of children, epitomizes why we as human beings deserve extinction. If we can't be bothered to put even a trace of effort in fending off a danger that has a demonstrated track record of eradicating entire classes of species o this planet (including virtually every surface animal larger than a medium-sized rodent at one time), then we, in our collective and profound stupidity, absolultely deserve to be eradicated and replaced by a more competent species, likely one that will emerge some tens of millions of years hence from some small creature poking around our ashes.
      --
      The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    2. Re:U.S. Govt by Restil · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is not entirely true.

      It approached the earth from the direction of the sun, but that does not mean that it has always resided within the orbit of earth. Although I haven't seen what the orbit looks like, there's a good chance that the orbit is highly elliptical and therefore, it spends a good amount of time outside the earth's orbit frequently enough to have been spotted in the past, assuming we were searching enough.

      Also, just because an asteroid resides within the earth's orbit, does not mean we can't observe it, even from the ground. It just limits the amount of time each day that it is visible. Both venus and mercury are within the earth's orbit, but we're still able to observe them from the ground.

      There will always be blind spots. And there will always be comets that are heading this way that we've never had the chance to observe because they were never close enough. The best we could do is get 100% of the asteroids that orbit the sun nearby.

      -Restil

      --
      Play with my webcams and lights here
  3. Amazing how we survived by kaladorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... to reach this point, when we understand our odds were so crappy. Oddly, we managed to live through a lot of these events before, and have survived a few thousands of years of recorded history without a problem.

    Something tells me that the people pushing this fear either have an interest in investments in related science or in (gasp) selling newspapers or advertising space!

    If we get hit by a big rock, we'll dust ourselves off. If there is an ELE, we'll have a challenge. Maybe the best thing for the human race, all things considered. At least it could give us a unified rallying point....

    --
    -- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
  4. Re:Just think.... by EvanED · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or, just like we compare most things to, Hiroshima Bombs. (What ever happened to the "Nagasaki Bomb" unit? Why it it always the "Hiroshima Bomb"?)

  5. Not going to change anything by jonman_d · · Score: 2, Interesting

    C'mon, we all know that, no matter how close an asteroid comes, the governments of Earth aren't going to change a single thing about trying to detect them. It's kind of like (srry for this, but it's all I could think of) terrorist attacks...we don't actually do anything about terrorism until we take a gigantic hit.

    Until an asteroid actually smacks into Earth, the governments (specificly U.S) will continue to cut back funding for searching for these things. Hopefully, when an asteriod finally DOES hit us, it'll be one of the smaller ones, and only knock out a few thousand/million people.

    --

    --
    http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
  6. Oh, the article! by pq · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Space-based telescopes, such as Hubble [...] are the only means of searching for asteroids in the daytime sky.

    Yeah, right! The author has no idea how carefully STScI checks the HST pointing to make sure you don't look anywhere near the Sun...

    The only way to detect these suckers coming in from the Sun side is radar or spacecraft telescopes at the Lagrange points, not earth-orbiting scopes. Those are just a handful of objects, though: for the vast majority, I expect robotic camera surveys are quite sufficient, if someone coughs up the money.

    Alas, if one of these hits the earth, then "the terrorists will already have won"(TM) - or rather, they won't need to win.

    --
    "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
  7. Re:siberia by lokki · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are all kinds of theories as to what happened at Tunguska, up to and including a micro black hole passing thru the earth. The best one has gotta be involving Tesla and his "death ray". http://www.parascope.com/en/0996/tesla4.htm

    --
    I won't dance in a club like this...All the girls are slags, and the beer tastes just like piss! -The Specials
  8. Re:Just think.... by Mr.Intel · · Score: 3, Interesting
    By comparison, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere by the United States was the Castle Bravo test in 1954, at 15 megatons.

    And the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere period was done by the Soviets in 1961 and was ~50MT.

    --
    ASCII tastes bad dude.
    Binary it is then.
  9. Something similar to SETI ??? by cOdEgUru · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Couldnt we build something similar to SETI that would distribute the load among thousands of cpus to compute the chances of these near earth objects trying to knock us out of existance ?

    I understand SETI being useful and all that, but its gonna be a sad day if those Aliens reach us a couple of days after our extinction.

    They might just think that cockroaches ruled the planet :(

    --
    Rapid Nirvana
  10. Why moan...the tech is there to do something! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    People are always moaning, "Why won't the government do anything? Why oh why???"

    The technology is there to build automated telescopes and image processing/search software to look for these things.

    Maybe instead of whining about it, some enterprising ./'ers should develop an open-source software package for using relatively inexpensive 'robotic' scopes (available off-the-shelf these days) to look at patches of sky and compare subsequent images looking for moving objects.

    Such an effort, if implemented by enough people, ...ala Seti@Home but of course requiring more technical skill of the users...could be very effective...and, needless to say, fun!

  11. Wildly OT by drew_kime · · Score: 5, Interesting

    France's solution to unemployment is to make it so you can't work more than 35 hours a week.

    That actually makes sense.

    Fifty years ago, half the population of the U.S. was employed in agriculture. Today, it's less than 2%, and they grow more food than the country can eat. And many of them are paid not to farm. If you suddenly put nearly half the working population out of work, then add in all the women entering the work force who didn't used to be there ...

    I think we're starting to approach the kinds of problems that have until now only been considered in speculative sci-fi. When we only need about 10% of the population to work to provide for everyone, what will the other 90% do for a living? And how do we pick which 10% it's going to be?

    --
    Nope, no sig
  12. Re:Collision by heybrakywacky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If this is not a problem, how big of an asteroid would we need (roughly, of course,) to cause a problem?

    A problem in terms of destroying the moon? Check out http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html and play around with numbers.

    The numbers for this one (~100 meters at 10 km/sec) hitting the moon are a 15 megaton explosion, a quake of magnitude 6.4, and a new crater. This wouldn't have any impact on the earth.

    Now, if you're talking destruction of the moon, that could be a problem. According to the site, it would take a rock 400km in diameter, travelling at 55km/s, to destroy the moon. A pretty unlikely occurence, in other words.

    --
    I'm sorry sandwich! --Brak
  13. Re:Where would it have hit? by AirFrame · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What a bunch of useless answers. What the person obviously wanted to know is, what point on the earth was facing the asteroid when it passed a point where it could have hit us?

    Based on this article, i'd make a rough estimate that it would have crossed earth's orbit path at about 0200h GMT on June 14th. So, all we need to know is what local time zone was at 1200h (sun at highest point, approximately) when it was 0200h GMT.

    1200h would be 10 hours east of GMT. My handy-dandy clock tells me that GMT+10h is Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, etc. So it sounds like Australia was facing the asteroid at the time it passed...

    Hope this answers the original poster's question...