Slashdot Mirror
A Rock Moves In Space
theBrownfury writes: "The BBC is reporting here that
a very large Earth collision course asteroid has been discovered. This asteroid, NT7,
was first observed on July 5th and current data suggests an impact date of
February 1st, 2019. NT7 is 2kms wide and on date of impact will be approaching
Earth at 28km/s. An asteroid of this size is large enough to cause continent
wide destruction. However astronomers are still cautious in reporting this
asteroid as the orbit of NT7 has not been fully verified. Current data on
NT7's orbit suggests it orbits the Sun every 837 days and travels in a tilted
orbit from about the distance of Mars to just within the Earth's orbit." The BBC article's headline (and accompanying illustration) are more alarming than the story itself seems to warrant: this asteroid has been given a 0.06 on the Palermo technical scale, which means it shouldn't bump getting run over by a llama off your list of worries.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Lets burn down the observatory so this never happens again!
Maybe they are just doing this so we all get worried and start to horde gas, food, and other products so the economy comes back.
http://www.maximum-cars.com - My little hobbie.
"You have 19 years to do something about a 2km rock headed for Washington. Go!"
Nothing like a crisis to focus the mind, eh?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Mother nature is a terrorist! First the thunderstorms and now the asteroids! What's next? Exploding stars? scary stuff
Got friends?
What about the chances of the Asteroid landing on a Llama? I'm taking bets!
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
Well, if Win2k was NT5, and WinXP is NT6, then I suppose it's due time that the next generation NT7 makes it's "impact" on the world.
We need to hurry up and send a team of foul-mouthed perverted semi-illiterate oil miners into space! And for the love of all that's holy, somebody start having sex with Liv Tyler!
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
The Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. If 1. the projections are a bit off as far as the arrival date and 2. it does hit the Earth, I'd say this might be a good reason to end your calendar.
Those aliens are running NT7 already!
Leave it to British tabloits to sensationalize a non-story. Fortunately I never see biased or inacurate stories at this site.
Check out the 3d view here.
Just fast-forward to Feb-1 2019, set the center on earth, and zoom in.
The most important words in the article (well maybe they weren't actually there, but I paraphrase): More data needed. There is still a huge margin of error in the calculation of the asteroid's orbit. It just might hit Earth at this point.
well i was caught in a llama stampede when i was younger, so anyone within a 1000 mile radius of me might wanna consider moving...
-f
www.blackant.net
For those wondering what they're talking about, NASA has a site about it here
It keeps getting worse and worse. NT5 had an estimated 65000 bugs, if I recall correctly, but at a few grams per bug (when they don't fly), nobody cared about such a tiny mass. But now NT7 would be large enough for continental scale devastation? Wow. That must be a serious number of bugs.
On the other hand, announcing a product 17 years before it hits, come on, that's not really serious, even by NT's standards.
You think you know about programming?
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
2002 NT7 Impact Risk
It doesn't look so bad. -0.14 on the Palermo Scale (recently downgraded?).
I told my cow orkers not to worry about the unix signed 32-bit int date problem! Ha-hahahaha, I love being right! Oh, wait a minute...
I guess in about 17 years it'll be time to ask that girl if she'll sleep with me if the world was about to end...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
I find it strange that there is almost 1/2 million geeks on slashdot, yet none of them have ever brought this up on these Near earth orbit stories.
Has there ever been any contingouncy planning made in case something like this does happen? Or is it all being kept a secret from the general population (i.e. only 100 of those grey alien ufo's for escape)
A company that did real work into this issue could stand to make a killing. Anyone that figured out a real nice way to make these NEO rocks bounce, blow up, deflect, time phase shift, or tractor away from the earth could pull some mass patents on that and laugh all the way to the bank.
People used to say if man was meant to fly he would have wings. Well, if man was meant to blow up space rocks he would have nukes, and he does.
... then the asteroids will have won.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Time to break out _The Hammer of God_ by Arthur Clarke. For those of you living under a rock (heh heh) it's a novel about a large rocky mass headed on a collision course with earth and the world-wide pants-shitting that ensues after it's discovered.
Good book.
This dangerous situation only get's harder to deride the longer we wait. I am doing everything I can to influence NASA to start working on getting a nuclear blast to deride the course of the oncoming danger. I agree that detonating a nuclear bomb in the course of the approaching llama is a bit drastic, but I refuse to sit idly by as the approaching threat of llama collision approaches.
It looked like the moon hit the north pole to me. Wouldn't that be fun? =]
What?
Considering the record they have established lately, I consider it highly unlikely Microsoft will be ready to ship NT 7 by the February 1 2019 date listed in the article.
They will probably just repeat the Windows ME trick, and release "Windows CANDY" in 2019 (so that they could confuse consumers into thinking that that thing MS Marketing had been talking about so long had actually been delivered on), then release the real goods two years later. Rather than the promised 2km asteroid that ends all life on earth, "Windows CANDY" will just be a baseball-sized rock that lands in Ontario, Canada, killing a small boy's pet dog.
So we should be safe from the asteroid until 3rd quarter 2021 at least, at which point it won't matter becuase the UNIX Date Rollover Bug will have plunged the world into anarchy and killed everyone by that time anyway.
Get your reservations in early...
Apparently it's too late... Check out this news flash.
Note the picture. The asteroid in the story is a couple km wide, the one depicted was hundreds of km (big enough to discorporate this seemingly solid little planet of ours for a while). Also note that it is hitting right in the U.S. I think that the artist has some issues with Uncle Sam...
In short, definitely unwarranted.
BlackGriffen
Smithers! Release the flying monkeys!
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
1. mine it for data;
...and, well, you get the point. If it's coming close enough, let's turn it in to something useful.
2. use it as a platform for whatever;
3. sell pieces of it to whomever;
4. mine it for whatever minerals it may carry;
5.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Yes, we're all gonna die! That's the Great Equalizer... nobody gets out alive!
Most of you only have 16 years to lose your virginity!
Heh teasin =)
Bush declares war on A Rock!
sulli
RTFJ.
We may never see Mozilla 2.0. :(
"Derp de derp."
According to the BBC, this is the first object to get a positive score...
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
... we need a protective layer of smog. Throw enough garbage into the atmosphere and the asteroid'll burn up.
Quick! Everybody guy a Canyonero!
It was first seen on the night of 5 July, picked up by the Linear Observatory's automated sky survey programme in New Mexico, in the southern US.
I work at Lincoln labs and acutally know the people running the LINEAR project (they are so proud that they are the best in the world, let me tell you). But for the rest of you, here is their website.
They find more than half of the new NEO (Near earth orbit) asteroids each year that are found. They have a telescope down in New Mexico and have the largest CCD (2560x1960 res) in the market. That's the thing that takes a digital image of the sky and compares it to past images to see if any "stars" have moved...i.e asteroid. The higher resolution you can get, the further out you can see. From their webpage, you can see they have found at least 951 NEO's. So there are a LOT of asteroids comming near us. But in space, near is still very far away. So unpack those bunkers and return to Real Life, we're still safe for a while. Also, the rate of finding new NEO's is decreasing, so that means that we've (humans) found most of the asteroids that can endanger us.
(most of that was taken from this post of mine from a while ago)
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/doc/palermo.html
That should help a tiny bit
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
The higher-precision text-based orbital calculator is more accurate. (And overloaded right now.) It has 2002 NT7 in its database. Both claim January 28, 2019 is the date of closest approach. Both claim closest approach around 0.8 AU. Remember, this is projecting many orbits ahead, and small-object orbit projection is inherently noisy because minor disturbing forces matter.
Either we'll know it's a definite miss in a few weeks, or this will be a worry for some time to come.
Don't worry everyone. I spent most of my youth in the local arcade preparing for just such an event!
Everything will be taken away from you.
A Palermo value of 0.06 means that the risk from this object is elevated above the background risk for such objects by about 15%. (The 0.06 is the log of the ratio of the risk to the background risk.) So however worried you were yesterday about collisions with 2 km asteroids, you can be 15% more worried today.
In short, not worth losing sleep over.
What about the alien passerbys? Do you think it is fair to them?
I was run over by a llama earlier today.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
...on the Liv Tyler part.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
actually, the best way to handle this is to send up a probe with a nuke, then just explode it about 50 meters to one side. The heat coming off the asteroid from the blast will push it to a new course.
OTOH
date 2004
In todays news, the nuclear device set near the Doom asteroid successfully changed its course, it will be here tuesday.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This should pretty much solve that pesky global warming problem...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Be realistic. Even those who insist on calling the US names all the time generally wouldn't accuse us of being inactive. Should this happen, I would be willing to bet that the US would foot quite a bit more than their share of the bill (calculated either way that you gave above), and take charge of the operation to make sure it's completed. And when it was over, the US would say, "Yout guys all owe us one." After which everyone would go back to hating us.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
By the time 2019 rolls around, machines will rule the world, it'll be their damn problem.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/close.html
give distances both in AU and LD (lunar distances) for the dozen or so close passes that happen each month or so.
Not that you should be alarmed.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You should learn from the corporations:
use hysteria for personal gain.
NASA needs money or we will all die.
NASA decides it need to launch counter measures from Mars
we get human on another planet, finally
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"This unique event should not diminish the fact that additional observations in coming weeks will almost certainly, we hope, eliminate the current threat."
Is he saying this just because the odds of a tiny (relativley) piece of something has a very slim chance of hitting a slightly less tiny(relativly) object in the whole universe? Or is there some property of Earth's magnetic field or some other force that would cause things to be pushed away from us? I would think we'd pull stuff towards us due to gravity, but I'm no physicist (or spelling bee champion).
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
The impact on the Earth of NT4 and NT5 was bad enough...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
In case you're wondering what this means (and I was):
The Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale was developed to enable NEO specialists to categorize and prioritize potential impact risks spanning a wide range of impact dates, energies and probabilities. Actual scale values less than -2 reflect events for which there are no likely consequences, while Palermo Scale values between -2 and 0 indicate situations that merit careful monitoring. Potential impacts with positive Palermo Scale values will generally indicate situations that merit some level of concern.
The scale compares the likelihood of the detected potential impact with the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact. This average risk from random impacts is known as the background risk. For convenience the scale is logarithmic, so, for examples, a Palermo Scale value of -2 indicates that the detected potential impact event is only 1% as likely as a random background event occurring in the intervening years, a value of zero indicates that the single event is just as threatening as the background hazard, and a value of +2 indicates an event that is 100 times more likely than a background impact by an object at least as large before the date of the potential impact in question.
Taken from NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/doc/palermo.html
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
buddy, that was funny.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually there are contingency plans that we as a planet can do with this much advanced warning.
Most asteroids such as this one are almost black in color and reflect very little incident light; this coupled with their small size make them very difficult to detect. There is a property in physics called albedo (no, not libido) which is basically the 'reflectivity' of an extraterrestrial object (the moon has an albedo of ~.1, ie it reflects ~10% of incident light). If we could find a way to change one side of an earth-collision asteroid to have a higher albedo, perhaps by icing it with water ice, then we have effectively made a motor to push the asteroid off its normal orbit. More light would be reflected on one side than the other, causing a slight difference in the number of photons absorbed on one side compared to the other. This absorption differential would be enough over time to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid. But this is the sort of thing that won't work in 18 days, it would have to be several years for the photon force to make a real change in the orbit. That is why we have the NEAR program, to determine orbits of near-earth asteroids in advance so we have a lot of time to figure out an appropriate way of dealing with them.
Something like icing an asteroid is much easier than landing a manned crew on it to put a rocket on it or blow it up or the other things suggested in this thread. It could be done using entirely automated systems.
Oh, and I don't believe that methods for avoiding the extinction of our species should be patented...
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
So, the palermo value of 0.06 (p is just greater than one) means we are very, very slightly more likely to get hit by NT7 than we are to get hit by another astreroid of equal or greater size before 2019.
Of COURSE! The STOCK MARKET. Well, shit. If a giant ball of rock is hurtling towards my planet, the *very* *first* *thing* that I'd be concerned about is the stock market. Get a grip.
The article says that it is estimated to be 2K wide, but the illustration shows that it is several weather systems long AND wide.
I don't trust the BBC. I'm waiting for Al Roker's take on all this.
The worst part is that kids will get a day off from school that I had NO CHANCE of getting off.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
The cold hard fact is that if an asteroid wants to hit the earth it is going to hit the earth. There is more or less NOTHING we can do with our present technology, or technology in the forseeable future.
Even with this, 19 year lead in time I'd be surprised if the collective powers that be could get something organised to nudge the asteroid far enough off course that it ceases to be a threat. Most asteroids are not found until far far closer than this.
The ONLY way our species will survive is to expand off planet - for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is asteroid collision wiping out THIS colony.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
You may be joking but there is some truth to what you say, I think we may need something like this to open our eyes a little. A lot of evidence points to asteroid impact likely being the biggest actual threat to mankind, but despite this far to many short sighted politicians wont give it a second thought! Specifically I'm talking about the Australian govt who a while back cut all funds to asteroid search programs, virtually leaving the entire southern hemisphere unchecked for such potential threats.
Hope you don't feel too safe with the fact that NASA and many European astronomers are searching the skies daily for these threats... Someone's letting us down.
(nb yep im an aussie..)
The torino scale is designed more for the general public. While the Palermo rating for this asteroid is now at -.14, which doesn't make it COMPLETELY unlikely, the Torino scale for NT7 is a 1 (maximum). Here is the definition of a 1 on the Torino Scale
Events Meriting Careful Monitoring
(Green Zone)
1
The chance of collision is extremely unlikely, about the same as a random object of the same size striking the Earth within the next few decades.
This sig intentionally left blank.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
well i was caught in a llama stampede when i was younger, so anyone within a 1000 mile radius of me might wanna consider moving...
Couldn't you do us all a favor and just move to someplace remote in 16 years? I'm sure we could all chip in and buy you a nice hard hat.
I'm a lot more worried about the asteroids that are discovered just AFTER missing earth. :-/
Damn you!
Now the corporations monitoring my transmissions won't use my idea of patenting astroid deflection technology because of your comment! Curse you and your kind!
Time to go roll up a tin foil hat!
--Toq
Anyone that figured out a real nice way to make these NEO rocks bounce, blow up, deflect, time phase shift, or tractor away from the earth could pull some mass patents on that and laugh all the way to the bank.
Well, that's just the problem with our outdated patent system. Not enough incentive for developing killer astroid deflection systems. Before you get the chance to make your royalties, you find out the end of the world is just past your expiration date and those damn generic solutions and open source hackers are already waiting in the wings to save humankind for basement bargin prices. If you want to make any money at all you've pretty well gotta tie up your application for as long as possible and then slap injunctions on all the would-be good samaritan heroes with some killer submarine claims. We can only hope that they'll increase the term for anti-apocalyptic devices - otherwise I just can't think of any incentive to innovate.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
which means it shouldn't bump getting run over by a llama off your list of worries.
Yeah but I don't want to be inhaling LLAMA DUST because all the LLAMA'S were turned into a fine white powder from the heat of the impact.
That would even further our trade deficit with the countries bordering the Andes with white powder like substances. Columbia, Peru, lotta white powder (probably cut with llama ash) comes from there already.
Don't worry about the alarmist graphic. You'll note that they BBC online site uses that "giant asteroid destroying the Earth" image every second on third asteroid story they run. Here's a few recent favorites with the scary image:
Asteroid Impact Centre Site Selected
Earth at Lower Risk of Impact
UK Centre to Study Asteroid Threat
So, yeah, basically you should ignore that image. It's not related to the story in any but the most basic level; it's a picture of an asteroid hitting the Earth... a stock one.
--
RumorsDaily
I read at highest scores first. The thing that strikes me is that everybody's been moderated to funny sofar.
What if a big-ass meteorite was really heading into a collision-course with our planet. I'm pro-post-acopoliptic-minded, but such a thing would mean slashdot won't be the same, that's a shame. So please take it a little bit more serious, cause such a thing is inevitable in the end.
What would happen if, say China, would take away this threath by nuking it. We all read past episodes didn't we?
My thought is if there's a threath like this it's going to be a boxingmatch between the most powered governments at that time,
, they are just there to pull out their muscles to show how easy it is to take care of such a threath. It's not more than a marketing stumt that's been bit on the expensive side.
The UN will follow the country that saved us everbodies asses, not for these reasons, but because of they always follow the strongest leader. Even the people who found out about it are going to be heroes..
What do you expect if this were true?
"...run over by a llama..." ...LLLLLLLLLLAMATRON!
Sure wish Minter would port this gem -- not only was it fun, but absolutely hilarious to watch and the sounds, the sounds!. Llamatron would be a great game to play whilst waiting to get bonked by a 2km rock.
Guess I'll have to do the Atari ST emulation setup again. Anyone know where to get the TOS ROMs file?
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
NT7, 16 years before crashing?
ha.. haha.... bwahahahahha. Good one Slashdot, you made my day
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
After a brief press conference today, president George W. Bush was seriously mauled, when he declared war on The Rock, actor/wrestler Dwayne Johnson, which resulted in a surprise drop kick attack followed by a head butt and a pile driver by the professional wrestler, before White House Spokesperson Ari Fleisher managed to stop laughing out loud and informing the press and Dwayne Johnson that the President meant " a rock" and not "" The Rock". President Bush was rushed to the local hospital where doctors feared severe brain damage, but concluded that "there was nothing there to begin with, so it couldn't be hurt anyhow".
The President later appologised for his mistake blaming it on terrorists who had sabotaged his statement.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Perhaps a group of interns will make off with it, eliminating the threat and saving planet Earth...
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
INCONCEIVABLE!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well, it's called NT 7, so you have a point.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
It doesn't look so bad. -0.14 on the Palermo Scale (recently downgraded?).
You mean slashdot-like moderators can save us from asteroids just by modding the rock down?
I'm impressed!
Better a rock than me.
Table-ized A.I.
time to go insainly into debt!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
The US government thinks the "war on terror" is more important than the space program. It's too bad the only country with the technological power to stop worldwide destruction is bent on causing it.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Regarding the title, "A rock moves in space".
Moving in space is relative. Relative to the earth, *every* rock in space is moving (unless maybe there is something in those Lagrange points, or whatever you call them.)
Further, the solar system is orbiting around the galactic center, and the galaxy (Milky Way) is moving toward the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
Personally, I don't want to go the the Virgo Cluster. Too many galaxies there to bump into and trigger nasty big-star supernovas in the process. But I have no choice in the matter.
Damned gravity.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh boy, here we go again.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
When/if this becomes a confirmed earth course, you can rest assured that the experts would never go public with it.
Last thing people want is a whole continent of people on the run.
by the fifteen year asteroid annihilation project but the asteroid killer satellite was destroyed when it slammed into the asteroid. Apparently calculations were done based on feet instead of meters.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
2002-NT7 was discovered 9-Jul-2002
There have been 102 observations (as of 8 hour ago) up thru 22-Jul-2002
Radar images show that the object is between 2 and 2.1km in size. The mass is about 1.1e13 Kg. This is somewhat light for an asteroid of this size. This suggests that it may belong to the "pile of compressed rock" set as opposed the more solid "iron chunk" types.
Impact speed is high, about 28.5 km/s. This speed is due to the nearly "head on" approaches for most of the close approaches.
There is too little data and some of the observations may suffer from systematic errors. So over the next week or two the odds of impacting will change.
Currently the odds of being hit by 2002-NT7 is about 1 in 100,000. The problem comes from how Earth deflects it during some of its close-by approaches.
The orbit of 2002-NT7 takes about 837 days. The path takes out as far as Mars and just inside Earth's orbit.
Close approach dates are:
The odds, given the current limited observations, of impacting us 2019 thru 2051 are slim. The real problems show up in the 2060 and every 7 years after that. Small changes due to the close passes in 2019 thru 2051 make it hard to pin down later on.
If this rock hits the earth then our way of life as we know it would surely end. Such an impact would be on par (but somewhat less) with the impact that ended the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
It is not known where on earth it might impact. Too early to tell. Not that is matters for a rock of this size ... anyway on early
will suffer sooner or slightly later.
Looking at the raw data: when one tosses out one set data (all from the same source) that seems to have a systematic error: then things get worse. That is, the limited data minus this one source suggests that the odds of being impacted on or after 2060 are much more likely. But again, more independent observations are needed before one can say all this with more certainty.
IMHO: 2002-NT7 does not have much of a chance to hit us before 2060. From 2060 on, things get really ugly.
Stay tuned ...
chongo (was here)
Oh - and the constant communication probably slows down the internet connection as well...
Component Services... you can shut all that down from there and give your computer a performance boost... and possibly a CPU cool down...
Sorry, but this has to be one for NTK's habitual BBC graphics mock-fest. The asteroid depicted is somewhat larger than Earth's moon.
- undoware.ca
oh please. The reason we call you names is because of comments like this. When Americans say things like, "ah geez.. we always have to save the world, it isnt easy being the best ya know"
I can't even count the amount of times I have heard, "The USA is the best country in the world" on American television in the past 10 months. No doubt, written by an American who has never crossed an International border.
Don't get me wrong.. I love the USA. I love what it stands for. I love the media I enjoy, I love the imported products I buy. But don't be so quick to say stupid shit that assumes the USA will be the only one who fixes the problem. You're talking about a country who calls NASA's Canada Arm, "the Big Arm". I'm tired of hearing shit like this. There are other competent nations too. You are not the only country that has the expertise and extra money to devote to saving the world.
Owe you one? Bah. Go back to hating you? You arrogant fucks... you just don't get it.
Again.. I don't mean this in as much haste as it sounds like.. I'm just really tired of hearing Americans whine that no one likes them.. then they say shit like this.
Still, God bless the USA.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
When will Microsoft learn... Here's an excerpt from some computer magazine's review of the new "enhanced" version of NT... "In one review the editor had this to say about Microsoft's new version of WindowsNT: "All in all it was a massive undertaking. Massive in scale. It ran quite fast in all test's, giving a maximum of 28km/h (kilo-mips/hertz). But when it crashes... it takes most everything down with it....""
--Kevin
I looked at the simulation at NASA and as far as I am concerned, Earth already crashed with this rock at 1st February 1980. It was about 20 times closer to Earth than it is supposed to be in 2019.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Could someone please mod this up?
Synergy is your friend
Yeah. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.
Well the consequences of being hit by a lama are not as severe as billions of deaths and an potential ice age. When you multiply the risk by the consequences maybe there's room for some prudent concern over this rock. Divide by the cost of doing something about it to figure out if you should take action. Right now they're observing to see if they can reduce the error in the projected orbit to see if it really is on target for Earth. That seems like the right course of action. I'm not losing sleep over this yet but I want to know where that rock is headed.
The asteroid is actually stationary and peaceful. *We're* going to slam into it...and the World's Governments are trying to cover-up this earthly act of terrorism.
-psyco
I don't know which is more scary -- the idea of an asteroid hitting the Earth, or the name "NT7".
Oh, that's just a little one.
We'll just tag it and throw it back.
Good thing we have a catch-n-release program in place.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Ok, Yes the probabilites of it hitting us are pretty slim. And as an earlier post mentioned, they're very slim before 2060. Probabilities of it hitting us increase after 2060.
.. with our *current* technology can we take this thing down (if it were closer than it is now ofcourse)?
So, my question is
[alk]
The KT event asteroid that hit 65 million years and formed the Chicxulub crater ago was almost certainly larger. Estimates of that impactor have ranged from 4km to 18km in diameter with more recent evidence suggesting that the smaller size estimates may be more accurate. Others prefer the larger sizes. Even if they are correct and the KT-impactor was on the larger end of the scale, an impact of a 2km asteroid is no trivial matter.
Assuming the same density, the ~2km 2002-NT7 has about 1/8th the mass of KT impactor. Perhaps 1/10th the mass if 2002-NT7 turns out to be a lower than average density asteroid.
When I said:
I should have said:
I want to repeat that the chance of impact prior to 2060, based on the current limited set of observations, is slim (1 in ~100,000 more).
The chance of an 2002-NT7 impact after 2060 is uncertain. It is hard to estimate the location of 2002-NT7 on/after 2060 in part because of the 4 prior close approaches and in part because positions become more uncertain as time goes on.
It is common to consider asteroid positions 100 years or more in the future to uncertain enough as to not be useful to estimate impact risk. This 100 year uncertainty limit gets shorter when one throws in 1 or more close approaches.
While 2002-NT7's orbit position will become better defined with additional data, the risk assessment of the 2060 pass (and beyond) will remain more uncertain for some time. Time (and more accurate observations) will tell how much the next generations will have to worry or not about 2002-NT7.
IMHO, there is nil chance of an impact by 2002-NT7 before 2060. The trend / perturbations on 2002-NT7 suggest that things could get ugly later on. Monitoring of 2002-NT7 over time, plus improved orbit models will tell how much future generations will need to worry about an impact >= 2060.
chongo (was here)
You are not the only country that has the expertise and extra money to devote to saving the world.
Agreed. Unfortunately, the USA is the only country that is immediately labeled as imperialistic when trying to "save the world."
No one said it would be easy to be the world's traffic cop.
I'd be very happy if the US could just sit back and let everyone go on the merry way, and everyone could love each other and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, there are a great deal of people in this world who have demonstrated their complete lack of ability to participate in the world community... one which they are a part of whether they like it or not. And I'm not talking about France here (<rimshot>).
While there are many other competent nations, and some, like France, which have more of a "say" in some areas of the world, the majority of the world looks to the USA when the shit hits the fan. The USA has the money, power, and military might to "get things done" -- it would be foolish to believe that with all that control they would decide to act against their own interests.
check it out here
look at the "blast" heading -- this is mostly what we are concerned with. (i linked to a higher level of the hiarchy in case anyone is interested in the other effects as well.
anyway... you can see from the data that on earth, one megaton bomb can devastate a radious of ~3km -- which is already larger than the asteroid... but i digress, and will try to look at this systematically
1) delivery of the weapon
this is probabbly the most no-brainer of the whole deal. all current ICBMs go into sub-orbit already anyway, strapping a few boosters onto them for escape velocity should not be a big problem.
it is useful to note that the asteroid will be a threat even if no impact occurs on 2019; in fact it would be a much larger threat down the line. however, the frequent encounters with it in the near future gives up plenty of time to approach it and take action.
2) effective-ness of the weapon
this is somewhat harder to determine. see -- the problem is that all of our data on nuclear weapons is earth-based; i.e in a atmospheric environment. -- the 3km effective radius is based on this fact as well -- the destruction is not from the blast of the weapon -- but instead the sudden compressiong / decompression of the atmosphere that transmit the detonation energy to do the destruction. if the asteroid is indeed loosely packet -- much of the energy will just escape; while if the asteroid is solid-packet -- the bomb may not be powerful enough to break it all the way apart.
before we go further -- it is very obvious that the bomb(s) need to be deeply implanted inside the asteroid for maximum effective-ness.
the best scenario to hope for is that the asteroid have a large ice content. the vaporization of the ice would then be the medium of energy transfer -- breaking apart the asteroids into chunks that the earth's atmosphere can handle - which is probabbly the best we can hope for.
similar things can happen with solidified CO2 / methane / whatever. but we won't know about the asteroid's contents until later (more observations).
the good news is that if the asteroid was ever broken apart -- the gravitational force between the pieces should be small enough that they won't meaningfully get back together.
3) possible hiccups
the fact is that simply not enough is known about the behavior of nuclear weapons in vacuum -- which is both very cold, and lack the aforementioned energy transfer medium. so it may be that the weapon is actually quite in-effective in space. furthermore, depending on nuclear bombs to vaporize a whole asteroid is only a dream -- nuclear weapons destroy via shockwaves, and the thermal energy is actually comparatively low for what we need to accomplish.
this basically lead to the fact that if we press the red button, the bomb goes off, and nothing happens to the asteroid except a shockwave rings through its structure but it remains intact.
moreover -- drilling 1km down on an asteroid in as un-proven technology at best -- so there may be tons of problems there.
4) some alternatives
besides straight-up disintergration of the asteroid, there can be other things to try, for example, if you insert bombs in a planar fashion - it *may* be possible to break the asteroid into two or more chunks -- and if it is properly calculated -- it should be possible to get the thing either crash into mars, or get into earth orbit. (on a side note -- this would be very cool -- space elevator baby) and the smaller chunk can be much more easily broken down by nuclear means. (this is assuming the asteroid is a fairly rigid body of iron, etc etc.
i had some other points -- but since this *might* be the end of the world after all -- i am going to go out and try to get laid now.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
quoteth : "On the other hand, announcing a product 17 years before it hits, come on, that's not really serious, even by NT's standards."
/. :
The following story will be on
Duke Nukem Forever Released!
Posted by CmdrTaco'sKid on Thursday January 31, @10:00
from the just-in-time dept.
----- One piece short of Legoland
You typoed it, there is an entry :)
Palermo scale.
Remember all that fuss and bother about Y2K? Remember the Unix crowd talking about having a similar problem in 2038 when the epoch rolls over?
Suddenly it doesn't seem like much of a problem anymore, does it?
Someone you trust is one of us.
I told the RIAA that they'd piss the Aliens off with all this MP3 buisness, but did they listen? Nooooooo!!!! Now look what happens.
Saying "we have extra cash too, we coulda done that" just doesn't inspire the same respect as for the one who actually did it.
Wishing for kudos? Don't wait for the USA. The USA will take another 5 years and repeated warnings before it bothers to try to stop this destruction. And that's assuming that our two rocks actually are on a collision course in 2019. So here's your chance. Start working to save the world right now. Have your plan in place and a prototype built before the USA even gets started. You have time. Whatever country you represent has a chance to take the lead. If you leave it to the USA, you leave the bragging rights, too.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
NASA: "Wait... is that 19 metric years?"
My deviantArt site
Indenda: "We're loosing ships Lur. What are your orders?"
Lur: "Increase speed, drop down, and reverse direction."
Fry: "I've still got a trick or two up my sleeve. Watch as I fire upward through our own shields!"
Bender: "He's a mad man... A MAD MAN!"
(Yes, weak pretense to bring out the futurama quotes, but what else is new?)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
With these stories, why do they alway show objects that are a couple of thousand miles large and plop into the earth like a pebble into a big pond?
...the most frightful disaster Earth has faced since NT4.
Undistributed Middle
All Russians were revolutionists, and all anarchists were revolutionist, therefore, all anarchists were Russians.
Does this mean that Taco Bell will be putting another target out, and we all have a chance at getting a Free Taco?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The threat is known, it's orbit watched and we have 60+ years to do something about it. Even with as little as 5 years and a more precise trajectory, I'm sure we could build something riduculously nasty to introduce it to... A government in panic mode can do a lot of things in that time, devoting all it's resources to survival.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The rock in the photo is hardly 2km diameter - and apparently causing quite a splash of water from... oh, anyway.
And the caption, "An asteroid could devastate the earth." is an unconnected hypothetical statement that was just as true when the BBC were first formed as it is today, tomorrow, or on Feb *2* 2019.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
So currently there is a better chance of it hitting us because there is a wider number of possible oribits. Once we have fewer possible orbits, there is a worse chance that one of them will hit us. Good explanation. Thanks.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It should read
One nation under God
there is not comma there.
Xaotik Designs
All I see on the BBC story is a graphic showing intersecting paths. Maybe they changed it.
For an excellent asteroid impact image, see this page with art by C. Crowley (my brother). Scroll about halfway down for the scary stuff captioned "A Hadean countryside. Here, a mountain ten miles tall falls out of the sky in an everyday Hadean event.
Earth took hits like this much more frequently in the Hadean than it does today, but Hadean moments like this still happen on a regular basis.
Chixulub Crater of Yucutan records a cosmic disaster everyone knows about. The large asteroid that struck Manson, Iowa, a few million years before that, must have certainly killed all life in central North America."
This asteroid will hit Buenos Aries, and our new fascist government will blame it on evil, giant bugs from another planet (even though these bugs couldnt possibly have the technology to do something like this...you will see when we get there to blow them all up)...
Oh wait, I've been watching too much sci-fi...
Never mind...
Please nudge it towards one of the following (in order of preference):
1. Los Angeles (esp Hollywood studios)
2. Washington DC, preferably on "lobbyist day" (yah, hate to see the Air & Space museum go but sacrifices have to be made)
3. Sen. Trent Lott's house
4. Las Vegas (they killed the Colorado river for THAT?)
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The cold hard fact is that if an asteroid wants to hit the earth it is going to hit the earth.
It's inarguably true that suicidal, sentient asteroids would pose a major threat to life on earth...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I'm not exactly sure where it began.
Maxis has had llama in-jokes in their games for a long time, and the WinAmp guys seem to have some sort o llama fixation as well.
They're just funny animals.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This means we do NOT have to solve the 32-bit unix timestamp problem!
Yay!
And now, I am worried about getting run over by a llama.
Annoying Peruvian geek trivia: no one over the age of 10 actually rides a llama. Llamas are pack animals and won't carry riders. They spit, too. They will happily run over you without prompting, all by themselves.
Won't you feel like an ass when it misses?
When I read that I couldn't help mentally linking "ass" with the idea of it actually hitting. That naturally brought Goatse to mind.
Runs sceaming in horror as brain melts
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Nasa, stardate: January 31, 2019.
Joe: "Hey Bob, have you seen that big object that we thought was going to hit the earth tomorrow?"
Bob points up.
Joe: "Oh yeah"
managers...why god invented purgatory
From the AP wire:
Scientists said if it had hit a populated area, it would have released as much energy as a large nuclear weapon.
Forgive my ignorance of modern scientific theory, but why does the density of people affect the amount of energy released? Would it have been less energy if it hit the ocean?
Maybe there is some human fission reaction anticipated here? If so, I think I know how to solve our energy woes... It's time for Carousel. Renew!
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
First NT3, then NT4 (without DVD support). Next Win2k (NT5?, with some DVD support). In 2019, MS releases NT7 and it destroys all of North America, but still with out really good DVD support.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
...then can we send Jeff Goldblum to infect them with an Exchange virus?
Can we make sure that Téa Leoni is near the impact site?
December 1, 2017
Reuters
Today in the 17th year of the anti-terror extended presidency, Bush urged everyone on Earth to pray to Jesus to stop the asteroid. He blamed democrats for stopping all efforts to divert destruction but said he had faith everything would be "hunky-dorey."
A summery of the anti-asteroid efforts are as follows:
2002: Republicans reject idea that asteroids exist.
2004: A bill funding more science is rejected as "pork barrel".
2006: Republicans reject theorey asteroids have ever hit Earth in it's 4000 year history, and therefore never will.
2008: Republicans admit asteroids may exist, but if one did hit the Earth it wouldn't be that bad.
2010: Despite mounting evidence that the asteroid will have a direct hit, Bush rejects the science as "shakey and controversial."
2012: UN resolution on asteroid vetoed by US as being too intrusive.
2014: Senate plan to stop asteroid rejected by Bush as "too costly." Tax cut for rich is passed.
2016: Emperor Bush rejects an internation coalition to stop the asteroid as "flawed."
The good news: The Feb 1, 2035 and Feb 1, 2051 close approaches have moved far enough away to become a nil-hazard.
The not-so-good news: The Feb, 1 2044 and Feb 1, 2053 passes have shifted from the nil-hazard to a close approaches. In the case of Feb 1, 2044 the miss is by about 86,900 km. In the case of Feb 1, 2053 the miss is about 30,600 km.
The size estimate of the object has changed from 2.03km to 2.06km in diameter. The mass estimate has been upgraded from 1.1e13 kg to 1.2e13 kg.
The bad news: The Feb 1, 2060 and Feb 1, 2078 approach continues to be a concern. With the data we have now the close approach on Feb 1, 2060 is only about 18,000 km (much closer than before). The Feb 1, 2066 miss distance has increased but the Feb 1, 2078 approach is about 18,800 km. But as I said before, future events will be hard to pin down until the 2019, 2044 and 2052 approaches become better understood.
Overall the impact probability has changed from 1 in ~100,000 to 1 in ~6,600,000. The Palermo Scale has changed from 0.06 to -0.05. However the object remains 1 on the Torino Scale remains at 1.
While the Earth's perturbation on the pre-2060 approaches has been reduced, 2002-NT7 still seems to settle into a 7 to 14 year close approach pattern post 2060.
IMHO, now: 2002-NT7 is not a problem prior to 2060. On and after 2060 those passes could be a problem.
We need more data and more time to improve the orbit models. Don't be fooled by those orbit calculators that you find in over the counter astro programs or on-line ones such as the supplied on the JPL web site. Those are good for most cases but fail when anything gets close or when one looks out farther in time. They simply do not have the precision needed to calculate such close approaches. To give you an idea of the precision: In the Feb 1, 2060 case a time error of only 550 seconds (1 part in ~3,200,000) is enough to convert the 18,000 km miss into an almost certain impact. And the uncertainly of Feb 1, 2060 makes it even harder to pin down Feb 1, 2078 and beyond.
I'll post an update (as a reply to my initial 2002-NT7 update posting) if new observational data changes things again.
chongo (was here)
Actucally, this really isn't a huge challenge. We have the technology at every level to develope a weapon that will destroy a rogue asteroid.
Design. We can not only land payloads on other planets, but achieve there orbits without much difficulty (relatively speaking). Hitting an asteroid using basic physics shouldn't be hard. It'd probably be wiser to assemble any Anti-Ballistic Event weapon in orbit. This will give it a greater endurance from it's propulsion system than from launching so deep within the Earth's gravity well. More endurance = greater in flight error tolerance if something should go amiss trajectory-wise. If we can put a giant space station in orbit, we can do this.
Payload. So far, nuclear weapons are the payload of choice for an ABE Weapon, ie; We have the most experience in them and they have plenty of power. If you can dig massive craters with these, surely it'd do something nasty to a space rock, though I'm no nuclear weapons in a vacuume expert.
Alternatives. Partical dispersion. Theory- A meteor burns up in the atmosphere because of it's speed and atmospheric friction. So our ABE Weapon is loaded up with sandbags... Yes, Sandbags. These will be dispersed directly in front of the incoming asteroid (collision course). Repeated assaults of this sort might have the same effect as an atmosphere, burning it up in a fasion.
Yeah, you could also try the Armageddon approach, I guess. Not a huge fan of it, but there's no reason why it couldn't be done. That's what drones are for, personally. Any laser based weapon would have to be built in space to be even remotly effective (vaporize? And barely within current technology). Still, it's looking like nukes (which we have LOTS of) are the best bet. Heck, you could even attatch orbit-built solid and liquid boosters to it if you wanted to get fancy. On that note, a probe with a four or five weapons landing on it's flank, detonating simutaneously might just bounce it out of it's track even if destruction isn't outright. See? no problems ^__^
You need a FREE iPod Nano
On a scale of one to ten, in terms of difficulty:
Locating an habitable world outside our own solar system, designing and building a large enough transport to support enough human, animal, and plant life for a long enough time to survive the journey and/or a faster-than-light drive technology, etc.
Difficulty: 9
(level of protection from asteroids: 100%
level of protection from solar heat-death: 100% (repeat as necessary)
level of protection from other threats such as plagues from alien pathogens, neutron stars, local supernovas, etc. : not all that good)
Designing and building a transport infrastructure robust enough to move engineers, vast quantities of equipment and materials, and vehicles either being large enough to support rotational gravity, or some magical artificial gravity technology invented, perfected, and implemented, to be taken to Mars, (presumably the best candidate) in order to establish self-sustaining colonies, in order to produce enough climate change, in order to be able to sustain life long enough to establish a permanent effect on the climate (which would require constant effort to maintain, due to the solar wind's constant erosion and lack of a protective planetary magnetic field).
Difficulty: 10
(level of protection from asteroid impact: six of one, half dozen of the other, if Earth gets creamed, who's to say Mars wouldn't also?)
(Level of protection from solar heat death: 0)
(level of protection from other threats - compared to earth?: 0)
Designing and building an infrastructure to create a vessel large enough (or again, artificial gravity) constructed to orbit at one of earth's lagrange points, overcoming hazards from space debris, radiation, lack of water and other resources, to support a large enough contingent of human, animal and plant life to sustain life indefinitely.
Difficulty: 8
(need I go over the pointlessness of the relative threats again?)
Launching a large ion-propulsion unit into interplanetary space, equipped with solar panels for energy, rendevouz-ing at 28km/sec with a 2km asteroid, becoming secured to the surface through some claw-like mechanism, and operation low impulse thrust over long periods of time, perhaps getting periodic propellant resupply missions - in order to slow the asteroid's orbit enough that it drops away from the vicintity of earth's orbit, or perhaps, eventually into the sun.
Difficulty: 2
Taking any of the first three solutions, (or even the fourth) and applying the social complexities to the human element, including maintaining a stable political situation given the various social and religious backgrounds, and propensity for populations of people to not easily be controlled over long time periods - and obtaining a population that could survive for any length of time that would make it meaningful towards the goal of survival of the species.
Difficulty: 11
(ie. given how crazy and fucked up we humans are, I'm quite certain we're going to extinguish ourselves long before any silly asteroid has a chance).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You're talking about a country who calls NASA's Canada Arm, "the Big Arm".
Then watch NASA's very expensively produced IMAX movie called "Destiny In Space" where Leonard Nimoy very clearly narrates about the Canadian-built robot arm.
I tell you what I'm sick of, hearing Canadians belly-ache about the fucking robot arm. We should just tear it the fuck off and put it to work welding ford SUV's, then buy a Japanese arm at Wal Mart - those Japanese can be VERY greatful. I bet we won't hear them bitch and complain every time some American news media fails to play the Japanese national anthem, gives credit to those crafty japs and their miraculous robot arm, and suggest viewers take a week-long vacation in Japan whenever it mentions a space shuttle mission.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Control Panel > Administrative Options > Component Services...
s =& threadid=1926
http://www.deviantpc.com/forums/showthread.php?
that tells you pretty much what everything does...
Oh, my GOD! I got to the server, and there was no response.
We're all going to die.
Not so good news: The odds of an impact prior to 2060 was 1 in ~6,600,000 and now is about 1 in ~4,500,000.
The Feb 1, 2060 approach is now very close, only 3570 km! There is still a great deal of uncertainly. At 1 sigma, the margin of error is about +/- 29600 km.
Sure, the center line of the model comes very close to the earth. And sure, the 1 sigma margin of error of the model paints a wide path that intersects the Earth. However the model relevance (i.e., how well does the orbit model match the real 2002-NT7 asteroid) is still in doubt and needs more observational data to refine it.
To give you an example of how small effects can change the model: A 125 second model error, adjusted in the wrong way, out at Feb 1, 2060 (about 1 part in about 14,600,000) is all that it takes to turn a miss into an impact.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Just because the orbit model draws a line thru your neighborhood doesn't mean that the Asteroid will follow the same path. We have to improve the model and validate it with direct and accurate observations over time before we can begin to place more trust in the model reflecting reality. So continue to pay your bills and refrain from end the world rioting. :-)
For those who are keeping track. The following is the list of close approaches (according to the model):
(your asteroid's mileage may vary
The Palermo Scale value has changed from -0.05 to -0.25. (A lower number means less risk) However the Torino Scale remains at 1. (A value >0 means there is something to worry about). The main reason for the Palermo scale drop is that there are fewer close approaches to worry about over the next 50 to 100 years. Fewer close approaches means fewer risky events. Fewer risky events in the next 50 to 100 years results in a lower Palermo value.
IMHO, It is still the case that there is next to nil chance of impact before 2060. It is 2060 and beyond events that are of concern. It is the pattern of orbit adjustments at and beyond 2060 that may be of concern.
p.s. My memory of the other asteroid that as a non-zero Torino value was bad. The other non-zero Torino risk object is the asteroid 1997-XR2 with a -2.44 Palermo Scale value and the impact odds of 1 in about 970,000. While better odds than 2002-NT7, it is smaller ... only 230 meters
across.
The impact energy of 2002-NT7 (if it
were to hit) is some 3333 times as
great as 1997-XR2.
And while an impact of 1997-XR2 (somewhere
around June 1, 2101) would not be fun, it
is does not have nearly the same potential
impact as 2002-NT7.
The other object on the hit parade that is being watched is 2002-NY40. However we only have 76 observations over 9+ days so things are still WAY WAY too early to tell or say anything. It has a -1.91 Palermo value and a 0 Torino value so far.
IMHO, I would not be surprised to see the 2002-NY40 drop in the charts as the days go by.
Well I have other work that I need to do, so it may be a day or so before I update things again ... unless something changes
dramatically ...
chongo (was here)
The estimate is done on one of those Pentium 1's with a FDIV malfunction. That way, not only will the asteroid crash into the sun, but by the time it does it will have crumbled and melted away into the size of a thimble.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Right. Let's install gigantic pinball flippers :)
on the poles
Great idea! Better get going on your US patent app though - you've got one year to file. Of course, there'll be no incentive to use your gigantic pinball flippers anywhere outside the US since you've just given up your foreign patent rights through public disclosure... and you'd better hope for a good NEO scare in the next 20 years or so, otherwise you should sell them for missile defense before everyone and their brother are making gigantic pinball flipper knock-offs. Maybe if you register giganticpinballflippers.com...
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
You are asking a good question. The reason why the close approaches occur on the same day of the year is because 2002-NT7's orbit is closest to Earth's orbit at one point. That point does shift around. The current model suggests the closest approach occurs at:
The path of 2002-NT7 will next cross earth's orbit plane going upward at a point about 132.1708757 degrees from the Fall Equinox. Now 132.1708757 degrees / 360 degrees = 0.3671413214 of a circle. Using 365.2564 days (Earth's year), 0.3671413214 of a circle * 365.2564 days = about 134.1 days from the Fall Equinox. 134.1 days from Sep 23 (~06 hr UTC) lands one near 1 Feb.
Take a look at this 2002-NT7 orbit diagram. The dark blue part of 2002-NT7's orbit is below Earth's plane. The light blue part is above Earth's plane. The yellow line from the Sun (red dot in center) going down and to the right is the 0 degree fall equinox line. The vertical yellow line, 132.1708757 degrees from the equinox line (as measured in the plane of Earth's orbit, not the plane shown on your screen) shows where 2002-NT7 crosses Earth's orbit plane. That crossing spot (the place where the dark/light parts of 2002-NT7's orbit meet near the yellow line), you will notice, is very close to Earth's orbit. That spot is the place where Earth is found on/near Feb 1. No other place on Earth's or 2002-NT7's orbit comes as close.
You ask another good question about deflection:
Not every object that gets within 35000km of Earth enters a geostationary orbit. The reason why 2002-NT7 is not captured by earth is that it is moving about 26.25 km/second as it crosses Earth's orbit plane. It is moving too fast to be captured by Earth and pulled into a orbit around our planet.
FYI: An object orbiting the Earth once a day 35,000 km above the surface is moving about 3 km/second with respect to the center of the Earth. The 26.25 km/second speed of 2002-NT7 is much faster.
BTW: Earth DOES deflect 2002-NT7. The crossing point and angle in inclination do shift a but after a close approach, but not by a huge amount. These close passes make the 2002-NT7 orbit tricky to model.
On a different question that somebody else asked:
Your typical astro/solar system display program that runs on your PC (XEphem, RedShift, TheSky, or even that Java app on the JPL site) uses simplified assumptions that are OK for general approximation of objects that do not have significant encounters. They frequently use point size masses and only take into account the Grav pull of the Sun and major planets. High precision models must use much much much more complex models. For example, in addition to accurate 2002-NT7 observations (to measure its position) one must use a non-point Earth model. That gravity lump called EurAsia has a slightly different "tug" than the Pacific Ocean, for example. Normally that difference is not critical, but when one is trying to predict with high precision year in the future, such details can become important.
Permit me to end with a note about critical NASA mission called GRACE.
There is a very critical mission (largely ignored by the general press) known called GRACE. GRACE stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The mission will obtain obtain accurate global and high-resolution determination of both the static and the time-variable components of the Earth's gravity field. This goal will be achieved by making accurate measurements of the inter-satellite range change to within one micron between two co-planar, low altitude polar orbiting satellites, using a microwave tracking system.
GRACE will provide us with an accurate Gravity map which will improve the modeling of very close approaches. I am looking forward to the day with GRACE's gravity maps can be used to establish more detailed close approach orbit models. I wish the GRACE team all the best!
IAACM (I Am A Celestial Mechanic) :-)
and I hope this helps.
chongo (was here)
If you have been following the recent articles about the "Interplanetary Superhighway" discovered by NASA researcher Martin Lo (I have been scouring the net for papers recently) you will realize that there may be a good case for early deflection. In fact NASA re-released the story about this with a little more data just this morning (jpl mailing list). This is hot stuff!
Lo is trying to map the low energy trajectories through the Solar System which result from calculating n-body gravitational problems for all the objects in the System. Apparently there are tube-like trails between the Sun and the Oort Belt along which objects can travel theoretically without thrust, and the dinosaur killer is thought to have come down an "offramp" to the Earth much like Shoemaker-Levy apparently did with Jupiter.
This technology was used in the Genesis Mission and chaos theory applies to the low-energy halo orbit around a Sun-Earth libration point. After orbitting around this point a few times the robot will (without thrust) return to a sample capture point in Earth orbit.
While I do not yet understand the math itself, it seems likely that this Rock is in a somewhat chaotic orbit and that small nudges can have very large effects on its trajectory down the way. A decade or two may not be long enough, or we might even set up a pattern which will smash us on a later orbit, but the technology is being developed right now.
So far, no pre-discovery images of 2002-NT7 have been found. A search of pre-discovery images is on-going.
I will post new updates to chongo's journal over the next few weeks. Please check my journal for the latest 2002-NT7 orbit model information.
chongo (was here)
I have read that the Tunguska hit is imagined to have been 50-60 metres in diameter, air-burst at a height of 8 km, releasing energy equivalent to a 10 megaton H-bomb. I read that it blew down and ignited 1000 square kilometres of Siberian forest. So clearly blowing apart in the atmosphere doesn't keep a strike from being devastating.
Kinetic energy is one half mass times velocity squared. So a rock or an iceberg 200 metres in diameter will release 64 times as much energy as one 50 metres in diameter.
I have a couple of questions.
A big rock that strikes an ocean can produce a wave that will devastate coastal cities an ocean away. How much smaller is the wave if it blows apart before striking the ocean?
It now seems that a lot of asteroids, and maybe comets, are not solid rocks, with a measure of structural integrity. It now seems that many asteroids more closely resemble very loosely bound piles of gravel. Tidal forces ripped apart Shoemaker-Levy 9.
So, if an asteroid that is a big pile of rubble is speeding towards Earth, at what point does tidal forces overpower its very loose gravity so it fails to hold together? If none of the fragments strike solid ground it will throw up relatively little dust -- which could otherwise cloak the earth in a cloud that brings us years of endless winter. How many deaths would even a year of total crop failures cause? Hundreds of millions? Billions?
Those of us old enough to watch broadcast TV over the air will remember how lightning disrupted the broadcast. Nuclear weapons also generate an electro-magnetic pulse (aka EMP). It is a stronger one, strong enough that our electrical power grid into a huge antennae, receiving enough energy to turn all our electronic devices into junk.
Am I wrong to believe a rock that air-burst that releases the equivalent of kilotons bombs would generate an electro-magnetic pulse, just like a bomb? 8 kilometres, that is about the height an airliner flies at. What is the distance of your horizon at 8 kilometres? A hundred kilometres? Hundreds of kilometres?
Some frequencies of radio can be heard at long distance. The radio waves are reflected off layers in the upper atmosphere. Can light at those frequencies carry enough energy to ruin electronics over the horizon?
Would the EMP from a 1200 metre rock generate enough EMP to ruin electronics around the Earth?
Lots of civilization ending threats face us. Race ending threats face us. Life on Earth ending threats face us. For most of them the odds are basically impossible to calculate. Will we end civilization? Render the human race extinct? Render the Earth unfit for anything but the most primitve life through poisoning the Earth with our waste? It is incalculable, because it depends on making a subjective judgement of whether we can learn to be wise, instead of clever. We are clever enough to build things that could kill us as a side-effect. Are we wise enough not to? That is incalculable.
Astronomical disasters are ones about which we can make reasonable, defensible judgements, and start to enter into actuarial calculations.
Yes, a close enough Supernova burst could destroy civilization. Slashdot has discussed this recently, and again here. 160 to 200 light years was suggested to be the distance beyond which civilization would be safe from a supernova. NASA's picture of the day site has half a dozen articles about eta carinae, a large variable star that they state is a good candidate for the next supernova in our neck of the woods. It is well beyond that 200 ly limit.