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Astronomers Upset About Asteroid Panic
DrMorpheus writes "According to the New Scientist, astronomers are horrified by press scares over asteroids - including the recent furore over QQ47 - which briefly had a one-in-a-million chance of crashing into our planet in 2014. So much so that they are toning down the scale they use to rate the threat posed by asteroids in an attempt to discourage journalists from covering potential collisions. Some even want the way asteroids are assessed to be completely overhauled."
The hype and panic brings needed attention to an often overlooked scientific field: watching out for big ass shit that could annihilate us. We spend far too little on this kind of work as it is.
do we really need to be notified every time an asteroid is within a percentage of a collision course? the media should focus on the more interesting statistics of astronomy.. like.. uh.. mars!
The Torino scale is trying to represent two completely orthogonal scalars (chance of collision and consequences of collision) with a single scalar. It's going to end up misrepresenting something.
What will it take before we get more money for watching the skies and funding for technologies that can divert a disaster? I think inciting panic or fear without exagerating the risks or facts can have a positive social change.
Right now, most of the sky is ignored and there is no solution to moving a huge asteroid just a little bit to avoid collision with the Earth or the moon. If Joe Sixpack demanded some kind of plan eventually something would be debated in Congress. The alternative is to watch a small part of the sky and do nothing if a real threat is detected.
It's depressing to think that we continue to keep all of mankind's eggs in one basket when we don't have to. Zubrin says $20 billion and 10 years to get to Mars and $2B a launch after that -- that's 70+ Mars missions just for what we're spending for W's war in Iraq, which I suspect would do a lot towards addressing the idea of permanent colonization.
Get some puny dictator who poses no threat to the US or do something so great that it'd be remembered forever so long as humans draw breath...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
but seriously, I think part of the problem is that scientists want to be the first to publish something about important things they have found, so we end up with people racing to the press to say they found something before other people found it.
Maybe what they need is some sort of identifier showing how much data has been collected to tell people how certain the track is. Right now, they just say, ooh, 1 in a million chance based on small dataset with huge error bars. But in reality it should be 1 in 5 billion because our error bars are huge. I really think this is the scientists fault for publishing really early data that has not been corroborated yet or refined--not the press... its not like they are hacking into the scientists computers and misinterpreting data, its the scientist trying to impress a good looking journalist or something or get some recognition...
--if only coffee and techno came in the same drink...
I know this is a little off topic, but...
I was thinking about the various reports I've heard about deflecting an asteroid or shooting it with a missle. One idea I just thought of would be to somehow increase the speed of the asteroid so that it would miss earth. Maybe by using a solar sail or attaching rockets to it that would increase it's speed. If you had enough warning ahead of time then maybe you wouldn't actually have to have much acceleration as long as it was continuous (such as the solar sail idea).
Do you think that would be possible? Would it work any better than blowing it up or deflection?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
So...what do they do? Instead of waiting the two days and seeing if the risk is real, they announce right away.
Let's consider the possibilities if they had waited a couple of days. In the overwhelmingly most likely case, they find after a couple days that things are OK, and so say nothing. No panic. All is well.
In the extremely unlikely case, it turns out it does have a reasonable chance of hitting the Earth, perhaps high enough that we actually need to do something about it. In that case, would a delay of TWO DAYS OUT OF 11 YEARS really have made a difference?
Either someone was very irresponsible in announcing in the first place, or someone was trying to get publicity for astronomers (perhaps to help with funding?)
"Chance of rain" in a weather forecast actually means "probability that you personally will get rained on," not "probability that it will rain somewhere in the area in question." Watch a time-lapse radar animation -- if those blobs travel across x% of the area, that's considered an x% chance of rain, even though the actual probability that rain will occur is 100%. (And of course weather patterns are vastly more complicated than simple celestial mechanics.)
A while back I read an article (I don't remember where) which explained that the comets in the highest eccentric orbits are only moving a couple of meters per second at the apogee. The tiniest perturbations at this point, including gravitational pulls from nearby stars, drastically affects the actual path the comet will take the next time it swoops through the solar system. (The disturbances get proportionally amplified as the comet accelerates from a few m/s to 30000 m/s or so.) The net effect is that these comets seem to follow a random unpredictable path on each orbit.
Of course, this doesn't really matter that much because we can't detect the comets at that distance, and the orbits are longer than a human lifetime. I just think it's interesting how our planet's long term fate may depend on the tiniest forces tugging on some comet.