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Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth
lmcl writes "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."
Thank god it was spotted after the fact, or else we would have had another stupid media frenzy that would draw attention away from more important matters, like friggin this, this, or this. Media man, it's like a toy for an ADD child.
It has been theorized that an asteroid impact was responsible for the "K-T extinction", when the dinosaurs vanished en masse. In that light, cutting funding for asteroid tracking programs is more than a little shortsighted.
Why wait? You already know you're going to die within the next 100 years. That's not too long for a rabid orgy, is it? Are you saying that you can't take more than 80 years of rabid orgy? 70, even? Pathetic.
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Actually, IIRC there's been some recent evidence that casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory [. .
Well, the 'serious doubts' I've seen cast have all had the ear mark of the desperate. But you're right. The Nemesis Theory and similar have not been officially proven, nor will they be, (the halls of officialdom being what they are). The point of the matter, though, is that people have known this was coming for quite some time now, have known it was not the sort of thing which one can Nuke away with a Bruce Willis, and they have been devising other methods of dealing with the expected aftermath. "Althernative 3" fantasies are actually based on something.
In any case. . . --I find the media activity over the last few years very interesting. And the proof, as always, will be in the pudding.
We'll just watch and see. With any luck, this is merely a blip on the radar and I'm just shadow chasing. But I wouldn't bet on it.
-FL
Through a study of physics, astronomy and cosmology.
The two objects had no relationship to each other. They were on totally dissimilar paths, made of different materials and of obvious divergent origin. In fact, only one of them was an asteroid.
An asteroid is orbital, just like a planet (asteroids are also called "minor planets"), and behaves like a planet. Once detected its behaviour is highly predictable.
The other was a meteor. Space junk. A rock. Very possibly a comet fragment but being hit by such a fragment means little about the odds of ever being hit by the comet it came from, which may well be tens of thousands of years away from coming anywhere near earth. There is a small army of astronomers, both professional and amatuer, watching for incoming comets because they're neat and get named after you if you see it first.
Tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. It isn't indicitive of anything much other than there's lots of stuff out there and a lot of it hits us.
Some of the stuff that hits us is clearly related to other stuff that hits us.Meteor showers are such related stuff. Some of the stuff is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff.
These two things don't happen to have any relationship to each other, and thus have no joint relationship to some third object.
This is not to say that something big isn't on a collision course with earth at some future point. In fact such an event seems highly likely at some future time.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.
Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
KFG
This is very hollywood of you. We _might_ be able to lessen the damage (by re-directing the object). We might be able to break it up (as you pointed out, but that might make matters worse).. Pointing a large object into the ocean might be _worse_ that actually letting it hit land! Anyways, to the point... We have to _know_ well ahead of time that the object is headed our way.. And without doubt. With very large objects, that might not be a problem. However, we are not talking about a dozen or so objects! There's more to track than we even know about. Hence, we really leave it up to fate... Isn't there a small project to keep track of the "most" deadly objects as it is? Lets say we watch what we believe are the 100 most "deadly" objects.. It only takes that 101 that we are not watching to make a really, really bad day. Funding something like this reminds me of the fight to get SETI off the ground. There are no immediate payoff's (which the goverment(s) look for!). If it happens, then we'll that will be the payoff. And we better find the object about to hit earth well ahead of time to do something about it.
Well, the asteroid is clearly WAY out of the atmosphere, so it wouldn't make a fireball like that. I suppose it's possible that a smaller chunk broke off or something.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that. Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
Or, it could be a black hole on its way to the earth throwing kupiter belt objects and other assorted space goodies at us. Soon the black hole will be here and kill us all! The government paid you to be a disinformation agent! You can't fool the good citizens of slashdot. (Do I still have to pay my visa bill?)
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