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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."
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, I really doubt that we could stop an asteroid large enough to do a lot of damage. Assuming that to be the case, wouldn't you want to it to be unexpected rather than knowing when it would happen. Would you really want to know the exact date and time of your death?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If this asteroid had hit the Earth, it would have done a great deal of damage and perhaps killed a great many people had it hit a densely populated area.
This illustrates why we need to work on a system to address hazards such as this. Scientists and astronomers have warned for years of the need to be able to defend ourselves, but regrettably nothing substantive has been done about it.
Many people are rightly concerned about spending too much on defense given the current state of the economy. The threat posed by asteroids, however, cannot be ignored. The best way to respond is with a comprehensive missile-defense program.
Some may object, saying that missile defense violates this or that international treaty. However, it's the only way to go. In fact, it wouldn't really cost anything, since we need to build a missile defense shield anyway to protect against attacks from Iran and North Korea. Asteroids are merely another threat that could be neutralized by such a system.
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Link-O-Rama. .
About 4 or 5 years ago there was a bit of noise around the scientific community about a mysterious very big object being detected around the vicinity of Pluto's orbit. An object travelling on an eliptical orbit around the sun which had been predicted by numerous astronomers trying to explain anomolies in the orbits of the various planets in the solar system. As the object came to its closest point a few years back, a bunch of disinfo was thrown up to distract the public. --Calming bullshit reports on the various 'Learning Channels', plus a bunch of culty nonsense from the 'Planet X' contingent. All horseshit designed to keep the public quiet or confused while the global elite prepared for the approaching calamity, (and for which they seem to think the proper preparation includes building a one-world government, killing a ton of people, and managing the whole affair from underground. Or some Dr. Strangegloves nonsense to that effect. Either way, nonsense stories clouded the issue with almost perfect success. --Including the interestingly sudden reassurances (which I never heard when I was a kid), from governments and government owned media that, "No, No. Rocks are constantly falling into the atmosphere. This is all perfectly normal." --Well sure, stuff is always falling, but there are certain scales of averages which are being ignored here. .
Works like this. .
Basically, every 3600 years we go through a cloud of rocks, and every 360,000 years, that cluster is replenished thanks to said big object, (a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun), which passes through the Kuiper belt and knocks new debris down to the Earth's orbital plane. The last year or so of comet stories and such were, I suspect, elements of the old cluster, and now we're beginning to see the first arrivals from the new one.
The pattern expected is that it will be like a rain shower. A few drops here and there as it begins. Then a short pause where everybody half-relaxes. Then the downpour.
Should be interesting, to say the least! --Espeically in conjunction with the dozen or so other massive things going on. So much to do, so little time!
Keep alert, folks! You don't get to experience stuff like this every lifetime!
-FL
I'm not sure if you're refering to this asteroid that went over India, but JIC.
As far as I know, it's an asteroid until it hits atmosphere, a meteor until it hits the ground, and a meteorite after that.
In other words, there has *never* been an asteroid strike on earth.
</pedant>
(and I can just imagine a pair of dinosaurs arguing about what to call the really, really big rock in the sky. Be a great Far Side.
I would also note that the Indian event also appears to have consisted of at least two pieces (one of which is said to have done minor damage in a different village). I'm guessing that there are more pieces out there (smaller, perhaps, but out there).
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of course, as the article points out, a 30m one like this wouldn't even hit the ground, it'd burn up in air and make a pretty show. Not much to worry about...
There were other (smaller) asteroids which made closest possible approaches. Such as the one which is known as the 'The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball of Wyoming' in local folklore. More details here...
http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/1972.html
This one missed terra firma by just 58 Km, close enough to create sonic booms, but not close enough to hit the earth.
An ICBM? You've got no imagination. Johndale Solem, in his paper "Nuclear Explosive Propelled Interceptor for Deflecting Objects on Collision Course with Earth", proposes deflecting the asteroid with a warheadless craft, propelled by 2.5kt nuclear bombs. The kinetic energy of the resulting collision would deflect the asteroid away from Earth.
And if you miss, just launch another one. A well designed interceptor should be able to intercept an asteroid one week before armageddon, in just six hours.
Look up nemisis and appropriate key words on goolge.. stuff like apocalypse, asteroid, planet X etc... in the same vein but with no extra hydrogen ball check out Imanuel Velikovsky and his theories.. a lot of stuff which you can find on the web though take the time to find some no rabid fans/dtractors and find someone that just talks about the theories.
makes for some intersting reading... the nemisis stuff is really an alteration of Velikovsky's ideas as far as I have seen.. ie someone discounts Velikovsky's idea of what happend in the past but presents an alternative with similar effects.
Some less extreme stuff is to check out belivers in catastrophic history/evolution etc... look into the mystery of the wooly mamoths (did you know the biggest source of ivory in history was from Mammoth tusks? ), the mystery of the Loese of Siberia and 'Muck' in Alaska... the lack of enough silt on the ocean floor, Niagra falls not being far enough back and other similar things, questions regarding the Ice Ages. The inability of dinosaurs to have existed based on current understanding of biology ( they existed but our understanding of biology says they are physcially impossible in size due to limitations of muscle mass efficiency etc, interesting reading )
All this stuff tends to get mixed up in debates about creation and punctuated equilibrium ( catastrophic history ). Regardless it clashes with most accepted mainstream science and as such is hard to find non-rabid discussions about some of the legitimate questions which have no answers in current theory.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
80,000 km is not the closest. How about the Grand Teton Meteor of 1972? This one was seen in the US and Canada as a bright daylight fireball. It was very close - about 50 km - but did not hit. Instead, it burned through the atmosphere and went off back into space.
Then there's this one, which is believed to be a meteor that was put into Earth orbit on the first pass, then re-entered 100 minutes later after orbiting the Earth once.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
That's a pretty poor article actually. Thousands of "earth-orbital" asteroids? I think not.
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It's also pretty clear that whatever happened in Tunguska Siberia wasn't an asteroid and consensus was that it was most likely a small comet. There's no "big hole in the ground" and no debris (other than some microparticles in the trees which may be related), thus no "big rock." There was a shockwave from the object vaporizing completely in the atmosphere, but no actual impact.It's true that what it was isn't certain (and likely never will be) and some still hold out for an asteroid, but they're in the distinct minority. For the asteroid hypothesis to prevail someone has to show how a really big rock can just go "poof" when we know that littler ones don't ( such as the one that just struck in India).
http://www.galisteo.com/tunguska/docs/tmpt.html
You'll find a true asteroid/meteor crater clearly
displayed in Arizona. That's what getting hit by a rock looks like. Over 30 million tons of meteoric debris has been collected from around the crater.It was a fairly small rock too, as space rocks go.
http://www.barringercrater.com/
You'll find a rather less clearly displayed impact crater in the Yucatan.
http://www.azstarnet.com/clips/signs_of_life_da
The author of the article was a "science editor," not a scientist.It clearly shows, as do the works of most science editors who are trained in journalism, not science, little, if any, actual understanding about the science she is writing about.
KFG
You said: "Was it also proven by this tv show that the cause of the ocean gas was completely unrelated to any kind of impacts?
For the future, link to or provide details of any sort of discovery claims, lest they be dismissed out of hand."
Reminds me of an article in Nature (Wood, W. T., et al. Nature 420, 656-660 (2002)) that discussed how methane in seafloor deposits is released to the oceans. One of the points discussed was that as seawater temperature rises, the base of gas hydrate stability rises. What this means is that some of the methane trapped under the seafloor in solid methane hydrate turns instead into methane gas due to the increase in temperature. This release of gas in turn will increase the pressure near the seafloor, and if close enough to the surface, or near a fault that allows a gas chimney to form, it can be released to the ocean (perhaps like a valve until the pressure subsided). Obviously this would be amplifying if it occured on a large scale since methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.
One possible method for being on a large enough scale would be catastrophic seafloor failure (maybe an earthquake or meteorite) where a large amount of initial methane is released. This, of course, could allow the amplifying reaction to occur with methane deposits far remote from the source of impact potentially leading to a global warming effect.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Well, an impact like that could happen any time. But on the other hand, it's very unlikely to happen within, say, next 20 years. We might be better off overall if we cut all tracking and observation for next 20 years and concentrated those resources on research and development of detection and defence technologies.
I mean, there's little point in observing if we don't really notice most of them, or if there's nothing effective we could do even if we do notice an incoming bogey.
IMHO it would be much better to do a few things:
- Establish stronger presence on orbit, so orbital telescopes and later on defence mechanisms become cheaper. Then establish presence on moon for same reasons.
- Get probes to land on existing asteroids, to get great scientific data but also developing ways to intercepting asteroids.
- Later on get a potentially self sustaining colony either to Moon or more likely to Mars ("don't carry all eggs in one basket").
I assume (based on this article) that we've been watching the skies for 100 years, and that this has been the closest pass in that time. That means that any give year we have a 1 in 25,000,000 chance of an impact.
Based on this simple history it's apparent that there have been 2 impacts of similarly sized asteroids in the past 500 years. Either A) my impact probability is off by 5 orders of magnitude or B) this has been a quiet century for near-misses. That kind of statistical variation is unlikely, so what's wrong with my numbers?
Assuming that we've only been able to accurately record near-misses for 20 years drops my probability of impact to 1 in 5 million. Based on that answer there should have been 1/10000th of an impact in the past 500 years. My answer is still off by 4 orders of magnitude. Assuming independent asteroids of 1m volume I go down to 1 order of magnitude error.
I'm going to keep thinking about it, but I have to do a problem set now. I'm interested if anyone sees a flaw in my logic or math, or simply has comments.
while (!sleep){
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It would have been just a great show!
...knowing that we'll only see a life-threatening object in the Earth's vicinity only AFTER IT PASSES. What's next, "Extra, Extra, read all about it: Armageddon on Earth!"? Sure, but what's the price of a newspaper going to be after a global killer?
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the Meteor Crater(TM) in Arizona, is that about 50 miles to the North, on Hopi land, there's a site that was the muddy bank of a river, where dinosaurs had walked and left footprints. The heat from the meteor impact baked the mud, and preserved these dinosaur footprints, some eggs, and other items of interest. It's an absolutely fascinating site, and not one that's generally well-known, because the native Americans who live there have not marketed it as a tourist site.
Visit Meteor Crater, and you'll understand how truly fucked we are if we continue to gamble with the survival of our species as we do. Sooner or later, we're going to lose. And when we lose, we shall lose BIG.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.