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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."
I thought I felt something.
a few days ago APOD had posted this picture. If this picture was taken recently, maybe the asteroid and the fireball are related.
The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by.
I think I speak for all of us when I say:
Gah.
The coolest voice ever.
should have got my giant shotgun out to try and shoot it. Next time.
-Tim Louden
She said "did you just feel the earth move?" - I thought I was good in bed.
But it was just an asteroid.
"What's everyone so worked up about? So there's a comet -- big deal. It'll burn up in our atmosphere and what's ever left will be no bigger than a chihuahua's head." -HS
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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.
The previous record for closest approach of an asteroid - 108,000km measured from the centre of the Earth - was set in 1994 by another 10m object named 1994 XM1.
I heard the record for the closest approach of an asteroid was already set billions of years ago. Apparantly everything died or some freak catastrophe like that. Doesn't that still hold the world record?
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
actually it was a small house, mine. thats right I lived in space...or at least I used to.
The ones that were closer were the ones like the recent one that hit Orissa. This wasn't even the closest one that could do any damage, it was too small to have even survived the atmosphere. That recent one in Wales which was recorded by the skateboarder -- that was about 80,000 kilometers closer.
Sheesh.
Infuriate left and right
Er-Um-I don't think so. Plenty of Asteroids have struck the Earth, and those are the degenerate case of "closest".
Did you really mean "Closest Asteroid of Significant Size since Hollywood Made Some Movies Recently About Asteroids Hitting the Earth and Wiping Out Humanity Yet Flies Past Earth"?
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How else would I know when to begin the rabid orgy of drinking, sex, and general debauchery?
I like to think that they'll figure a few dinosaurs did survive and lived in grand buildings as the rulers of all mankind.
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.
Are this just fragments of a much larger object that is heading towards earth?
No.
KFG
Damn you random chance! I'll get you next time.
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).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Well, in the grand scale of things, asteroids are going to increase dramatically in the next little while. When I say next little while, I mean the next 50 million years.
We're entering a phase where our system is moving back into the galatic disk in our solar system. In fact, we're closer to the middle of the galactic disk now than we have been for about 70 million years.
Think of it this way - as we whip around in the arms of the milky way, we also move up and down in them. I wonder if an attempt at ascii art would help explain...
------+++------ - Milky Way
^- Us
We accually move back and forth from the top of the dash to the bottom of the dash. Comprende? So we're now moving into the more dense part of the disk, so we'll see more asteroids. Coincedence that the last time we were here the dinosaurs mysteriously vanished? I think not.
Now, one the size of a small house could do some decent damage. Assume that a small house is about 15 meters in diameter. An asteroid about 100 meters in diameter hit siberia in 1908 and flattened 2000 Square Miles of forest. These things aint big, but they do good damage.
.
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...
Pictures and details here:t m
http://www.birtwhi.demon.co.uk/Gallery2003SQ222.h
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Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems moving an asteroid in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut it up into six pieces and pile it all together.
Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?
Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in deep space for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up asteroid will look like curry to a pisshead. You need at least sixteen hundred pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through an asteroid that weighs 10 tons in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked asteroid every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig.'
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
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.
The blurb states: "...closest approach of a natural object ever recorded..."
This village replies: "Yeah, right."
Completly random and un-connected events are bound to coincide sometimes.
Much like the Cancer Hot Spots in the US.
Statistically if cancer is totally random you will have hotspots of cancer. And the quantity of so called hotspots matches what is to be expected.
Have you ever rolled doubles twice in a row in Monopoly?
Were you like, How can this not be related?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
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.
You can take this tenth planet and stick it where the sun don't shine.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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.
y 1b .html
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
Let's keep in mind that such an asteroid striking the atmosphere would do very little damage other than a spectacular lightshow. This kind of thing happens all the time; don't let the recent media hype over the recent asteroid probabilities (which were all well under the background probability anyway!) lead you astray. Without comprehensive programs, it's inevitable that the geometry of orbital mechanics means we'll tend to find these near-misses after, not before they hit, anyway.
It's kind of strange to see the media labeling this as the nearest miss so far. When, uh, lots of asteroids, huge, big, medium-sized, small, and dust-sized have hit in the past.
Also, diverting a large one into an ocean would still cause problems, probably just as bad as it hitting on land.
Actually, a large scale ocean impact is MORE devastating than a land impact. With a land impact you punch a big hole in the ground and throw a bunch of dust into the air. With an ocean strike you get the same, with the added bonus of a steam explosion as the water in the impact area instantly converts to its gaseous form. Remember, steam expands. As it expands up and out from the impact point, it displaces the atmosphere creating a second shockwave capable of devastating regions thousands of miles from the strike zone.
Best impact point: South Pole. Glacial melting may be an issue, but that'll give us time to evacuate and minimize casualties.
Worst impact point: In the ocean just off the coast of any continent. The ocean is shallow enough to allow the meteorite to strike the ground and simulate a ground impact, but deep enough to allow a massive steam explosion.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Astronomer to lab assistant: "Hmm; it's too close to call. Hand me those calipers, willya?" ;)
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
This kind of event seems to be happening more often lately. I think it's just reported more often.
Even knowing than I can't help but feeling a bit uneasy. What about people thinking we are close to the "Deep Impact" or "Armageddon" movie ?
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
We do not know the composition of the "rock" that flattened Tunguska. It very well could have been an asteroid. Most likely it was a small comet, but we simply do not know.
/ pe shtigo.htm
As I stated its unlikely we will ever know. We do not know because it left behind no debris from which to determine its composition and created no crater. This alone is puzzling.
Another "airblast impact" is known that destroyed several hundred square miles of forest in Brazil in 1930 but seems to have left a crater and debris, although this is still being studied.
While this impact has several intersting points of convergence with the Tanguska event it has a number of points of divergence as well.Such as the crater.
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
The Chicago fire "theory" (hypothesis really, since there is absolutely nothing to back it up) is a very old crackpot "the sky is falling" story. In "theory" it could be possible, but it defies many points of logic and known science.
I might point out that it is common for for there to be many fires across the midwest, even at the same time, under certain conditions, and those conditions prevailed at the time. It is little reported for instance, that Chicago had already had a number of fires that same season and was a tinder box just waiting for the spark to set it off. As was most of the midwest.
There is no reason to suspect a meteor for setting off fires during hot, dry weather which completely dried ponds when no meteoric activity or big explosions in the sky were reported.
Tokyo has burned down a lot too, as have other cities in Japan. That's what happens when you build your houses out of sticks and paper, then heat them with coals in the middle of the living room floor and light them with fire.
http://www.boisestate.edu/history/ncasner/hy210
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/skyfire.html
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.
Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these...
Studying them (from a safe distance) would be way more cool than, for example, watching the Perseids (too predictable in timing and too unstable, for they fade away to a blue screen err..sky).
Also, I wonder if you could run NetBSD on them.
Not to forget, if they come really close there will be great need for tweaking them, too. (how's that for geekiness?)
And if they do hit us, well, that will be the most 'massive' DDoS attack in history...
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
The Sun (and solar system) last crossed the plane of the Galaxy 2 million years ago and we are currently in the thick of the particulate dust which is held near the plane.
However, the sun is presently located about 50 light-years above the central plane of the galaxy and is currently moving away from the plane of the Milky Way at 7km a second. It is estimated that it will take 14 million years for the gravitational pull of the Galaxy to stop our outward motion and begin to bring us back in.
Unless the Solar system is about to dissipate 7km/second worth of velocity and do an about face and the travel at 100 times the speed of light back to the plane, we won't be back there any time soon.
I think what you were trying to describe is the Earth's path through the Solar system. We will be passing back through the path of the ecliptic which is in effect the 'plane' of the Solar system where the majority of small hard rock type objects reside.
This is, of course, at the system level of motion rather than the galactic level.
We are here:-
Approx 28,000ly from galaxy centre on the 'Orion' arm.
Approx 50ly from mean plane of galaxy
Approx speed relative to galaxy centre: 200km a second.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The show said that there was a temperature rise of about 5 degree C, cause unknown possibly Siberian sheild lava flow, and this warmed the seas enough to cause the melt/sublimation of large amounts of Methane Hydrate releasing large amounts of methane causing a greenhouse effect and another 5 degree rise in global temp.
Links and tidbits:
BRITISH SCIENTIST PUTS ODDS FOR APOCALYPSE AT 50-50
"Humans may have come close to extinction about 70,000 years ago... The study suggests that at one point there may have been only 2,000 individuals alive as our species teetered on the brink."
Try to imagine 1000 volcanoes erupting in the same place at the same time.
"The predicted effects of a Yellowstone eruption are the immediate devastation of North America followed by several years of freezing weather for the whole world."
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).
A Russian scientist did, however, reproduce a blast pattern identical to the one on the ground by building a scale model of the terrain and sliding a small explosive down a wire. Detonating at different heights/speeds/angles made several different patterns, among them the same "butterfly".
Until someone can generate/model the same blast pattern by some other method, the exploding object theory is good enough for me. BTW, the experiment was repeated for the documentary I watched, so I will give it more weight than an untested theory. I don't like the thought of having to set up all those toothpick "trees" in the clay after each blast!
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){
sheep++;
}
It would have been just a great show!
88,000 kilometers = 54,680.6649 miles
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
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?)
...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!
Because you are looking at the sun when you look towards the inside of earth's orbit. All the dim stuff gets washed out in the sun's light.