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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...'"
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.
Every time we hear about one of these it's closer than the last time.
Is somebody aiming these things?
Analysis shows that they are originating from a far-away planet. An ugly planet. A bug planet.
GMD
watch this
We'll see any real asteroid threats about 3 days sooner.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
In all fairness, the article states that the path of the asteroid was on a line with the sun. There is no way Earth based telescopes could have seen it, even had they known exactly where to look.
This will become more scary in the future, when there is some capability to deal with an asteroid on a collision course. When we get to that point, we'll be complacent and will eventually end up being sucker-punched by one of these asteroids coming "out of the sun".
And it appears to have crashed into the BBC's web server...
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
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
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
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
8:03 P.M. EST
Bush declares a "War on Asteroids".
Bush: Our nation faces a threat to our freedoms, and the stakes could not be higher. We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill -- kill all Americans, kill all Jews, kill all Christians, kill all Muslims, and kill all mankind. We've seen that type of hate before -- although they're near misses, the only possible response is to confront it, and to defeat it.
This enemy tries to hide behind a peaceful cosmos, yet its murderous intent is obvious.
We will, no doubt, face new challenges. Make no mistake. Although we have absolutely no idea where you are, when you'll come, or even how big you are - wherever you are, whether in our solar system, in our galaxy, and outside the galaxy, we WILL track you down, and we'll defeat you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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?