Slashdot Mirror
How We Knew AL00667 Would Miss Earth
jefu writes "In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though. This story (from NASA/Ames) talks about the discovery of the object and the process that astronomers went through to determine if the asteroid was or was not a threat."
I'm glad they're so confident. I, for one, find the thought terrifying. :)
Too bad they already made the (17 versions of) the movie about this. It's a nice story.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
perhaps AL00667 creates MADMEN
Even if it was discovered that an asteroid were bound for earth, I don't think we've got any better idea than shooting a ragtag band of oil drillers up to the meteor to blow it up.
We probably could have had something in place to shoot such a threat down if we had fully funded the Star Wars MDS project, but sadly geopolitics killed that project.
It might be time to start thinking realistically about ways to deflect asteroids from Earth impact instead of relying on 'we worked it out using computer simulation' assurances.
I have been pwned because my
Another article on Miss Earth
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
that most people didn't hear about the asteroid until long after the near-miss was over. Seems to bring up the old argument of whether it'd be better to inform the public and try to do something about it or keep it under wraps and possibly die in blissful ignorance...
So many to choose, since it was an entire episode, but this one seems appropriate:
Sounds like the doomsday whistle! Ain't been blown for nigh onto three years.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Where is my MADMEN when i need one?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Else we'd be meeting all the time travelers from the future
No problem! ... Bruce Willis will bust us out! ... Our super-geniuses will come up with a 5min to deadline plan and blast this bugger to pieces! ... It won't hit us anyway, because it did not hit us up to today.
Tell me Mr.Politician, what is more important: Survival of mankind or playing the powermonger game with your politician-buddys?
I say, if politicians (which are by the way trusted with OUR FATE!) behave like they do today they are gambling with the chance of survival for the entire human race. This should be considered a crime and prosecuted accordingly.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Onlooker1: It would mean the end of life as we know it ? ... but we don't really see a threat to the human species. .... not to mention rabid money hungry CEO types... along with a few cities as collateral damage.
Scientist: No, but it might burn up a few cities and destory 70% of the humans
Onlooker2: So I'd be dead ?
Scientist: But the people left alive will have an excellent chance of survival due to the systematic culling of slashdot trolls
Onlooker1: Why did you keep it under the wraps ?
Scientist: We were kinda hoping it would slag Sanford Wallace in location... and have the Pope claim it was divine intervention
Onlooker3: What about SCO ?
Scientist: Looks like the next one from Kuiper belt would do that clean
PS: maybe you should read "God's Debris" to be frightened by Slashdot.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
After buying a milion cans of baked beans, a zillion beer cans and 10 years worth of Playboy magazines (only for historical purposes, of course) they waited it out for a couple of days in an underground bunker.
Since they didn't felt any shake, it was proven that the meteorite had missed the Earth.
It was further proven that a zillion cans of beer barely lasts a couple of days and that having a million cans of baked beans is pretty useless when you forgot to bring a can-opener
One thing of note is that somehow, 10 years worth of Playboy magazines disapeared without a trace.
Short Warning Times
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Article Posted: February 19, 2004
By: David Morrison
For the story of AL00667, which briefly masqueraded as an asteroid that would hit the Earth within two days of its discovery, read on.
February 19, 2004 Short Warning Times
Following is information on the small asteroid known last January 13-14 as AL00667. A preliminary analysis of the discovery data for this object yielded a possible impact with Earth in less than 2 days time -- a situation not encountered previously in the Spaceguard Program. Although we knew at the time that such a prediction of imminent impact was improbable, a collision could not be ruled out. And if a possibility of an impact in 2 days existed, what should we do about notifying governments or the public? The story of this situation on January 13, 2004, is included as part of a paper by Clark Chapman (Southwest Research Institute) presented on February 22 at the Planetary Defense conference of the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). Several paragraphs taken from this paper are reproduced below. Following these quotes from Chapman's paper are additional quotes from a letter Brian Marsden (Minor Planet Center) wrote to CCNet on 14 January on the same subject. Finally, there is a statement posted on the website of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) discussing what lessons we should draw from the story of AL00667, and how such a situation might be better handled in the future.
Asteroids never cease to surprise us. We may never encounter a situation just like this again, but we are fairly sure to have other crises as the rate of discovery of NEAs continues to increase.
David Morrison
FROM CLARK CHAPMAN'S AIAA PAPER "NEO IMPACT SCENARIOS"
presented February 22, 2004
"Just last month (January 2004) perhaps the most surprising impact prediction ever came and went, this time out of the view of the round-the-clock news media. It illustrates how an impact prediction came very close to having major repercussions, even though -- with hindsight -- nothing was ever, in reality, threatening to impact. It is a story of success in that the impact prediction was nullified in record time, less than half-a-day, but the success was accomplished through a set of ad hoc, unofficial, and often unfunded activities and relationships, although assisted in major ways by the official infrastructure, such as it exists (the LINEAR Project, the IAU Minor Planet Center, and the NASA NEO Program Office).
"About 36 hours before President Bush's planned speech at NASA Headquarters on future American space policy, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) observatories in New Mexico routinely recorded four images of a moving object. Half a day later, on Tuesday, January 13th, these data were sent (as part of the daily submission of data) to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just before going to dinner, MPC research Tim Spahr ran the data through standard software to generate a nominal ephemeris for the new object. These are posted on the publicly accessible NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) so that amateur and professional asteroid astronomers around the world might be able to follow up on the LINEAR observations that night. It is through such follow-up astrometry that NEO orbits can be refined so that the object is not permanently lost. Spahr posted the ephemeris, based on LINEAR's four detections, on the NEOCP under the designation AL00667, along with ephemerides for several other recommended targets. Less than an hour later, a European amateur astronomer, Reiner Stoss, went to the NEOCP and noticed a curiosity: AL00667 was predicted to get 40 times brighter during just the next day, meaning that it was going to be six times closer to the Earth! He expressed his amazement on Yahoo's MPML (Minor Planet Mailing List) chatroom on the internet.
"Professional asteroid researcher Alan Harris happened to be monitoring the chatroom and noticed the strange
NASA Server hit by slashdot asteroid. They didn't see it coming...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
In the past fifty years, we have started to gain the technological capability to detect potential collisions with asteroids.
That does not make such a collision more likely in the next fifty years -- or hundred and fifty, or fifteen hundred. Significant and successful collision are _rare_, much rarer than earthquakes, tornados, or even human-caused meteorological effects (as in weather systems, not meteors).
It doesn't matter if we can see "just how close we came". It matters that we know, empirically, that there are vastly more pressing concerns.
What I don't want to see is an orbital weapons platform deployed under false premises. If the pretenses are true, that's a different story. Just don't tell me its to shoot down asteroids!
--Dan
try this link for more info http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/mn/0402/09.htm
That's about the size of the Tunguska object (probably a comet, since it exploded in mid-air and didn't leave a crater). Enough to make a mess of a big city or a pretty impressive tsunami, but not enough to wipe out mankind.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
But, george noorysp?, has david booth(the dreamer) and wayne green (the guy that thinks we never went to the moon) on coast to coast am. They say were doomed in Septermber 2004. I don't know too much about david booth. I guess it was his dream, but I think they are just scaring folks.
I find the number 667 Highly suspicious..
Is number 666 ever issued? A lot of numberiung systems miss this one out, in order to keep the religeously insane from freaking. For instance the UK number plate authority stopped using it a few years ago after complaints from some quarters.
So my real question is: Would this have -actually- been AL00666?
Spooky...
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Nah they just have been hit by an asteroid, and you will be crushed by the waves in some minutes. =)
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
If it hits the Slashdot compound, it's good.
... chop, chop?
And if it hits the campus of Troll Academy, the universe will rejoice in all it's splendor! 2 cars in every garage and free beer!!!
Ooooh...a chainsaw and a troll. Is it good or is it
Exciting !!
And maybe my neighbours underground bunker would have finally proven to be useful for things other than coding marathons...
This would also be one hell sure way to get rid of windoze once and for all... only something as distributed as open-source software can survive such a catastrophy... wouldnt it be amazing if entire source code of windows was lost. wow !
Now compare that to the linux source present on millions(?) of computers all over the world. Reminds me of the phoenix...
tisk tisk..
(warning: seriousness levels dangerously low)
[all generalizations are untrue except this one]
It only means that no one has invented a time-travel machine YET.. The way I understand it, IF it is at all possible then you wouldn't be able to be back in time BEFORE the creation of the time-travel machine / worm-hole / space-time effect / quantum-parallel universe traversal.
You say that as if there's something wrong with being a perverted pothead...
The owls are not what they seem
Here's an animation of the object. The link to the yahoo egroup discussion is also worth looking at. The discussion morphs from everyone thinking it's a joke post to realizing that the asteroid exists. It's an interesting log of people coping with uncertainty.
Slashdotters can continue to sleep comfortably with the knowledge that TCP/IP is designed to withstand such an event; lets just hope there's a backup of the /. backend in case its server(s) get struck, shorted by the tsunami, or looted by the local villagers.
Mod me down as flaimbait or whatever, but I personally think we need a global cataclysm. We don't need something that kills off the entire human population, but we certainly need something to cleanse our planet.
We need something to take our collective heads out of our asses and come together as one people and work together for the common good.
The world as it is... is in a sad state. I don't think I even need to explain why... just watch the censored news.
I'm waiting for the follow up article: "The Slashdotting that hit without warning."
I meet a guy on the street once,
said he was from the future;
shared his wine with me, he did.
His Delorian someone stole, they did.
his future they did steal too.
his past I give to you.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
... Much like the server with the article, the Asteroid was slashdotted causing it to malfunction and miss the earth.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
They appear to have been /.'ed
What if Iron asteroid 1/2 km in size plunges into earths atmosphere? Would that not have a significant impact?
The news told me everything was good and everybody was happy, so I really don't see your point :)
We're all moving to Mars, aren't we? so i Guess the important question is , was it close to hitting mars?
It's those pesky gould's they are trying to defend us against..
or maybe it's just Bush who has too many Stargate episodes..
We were lucky this time, but it is clear that we need to do something about such threats. Here is what I propose:
We build a nondescript isosceles triangular spaceship, controlled by one man with a joystick. Left and right rotate the ship, up thrusts the ship forward, and down, well, down depends upon your configuration. Optionally, it could throw the ship through hyperspace to some other random point in space, or else it could put deflector shields up around the ship.
In addition to the joystick, the ship's pilot should have access to a red button (it must be red). Pressing the button should cause balls of energy to shoot out of the front of the ship, capable of breaking apart large asteroids, and destroying small ones. Pressing the button should also make a "PCHOW!" sound.
It is our clearest and best long-term option.
If anarchy is ever declared, I think the best bet would be to get about thirty or forty people together and steal a couple of school busses. Then you could take over WAL*MART ( one of the mega variety with the grocery store ) You would then park the school busses in front of the entrances and post sentry's on the ramparts of the well stocked ( with guns, ammo, food, supplies ) cement, fort like building. The parking lot would act as a killing field for any would be interlopers.
Eat at Joe's.
AL00667 is not the number of the beast; it was off by one. Ergo, it would not be the one to end the world.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Let's just get this straight: according to the article, the initial data were of low precision, they implied a very large uncertainty in the asteroid's trajectory. (In the event, it wasn't even a near-miss -- it was millions of km off, several times the moon's distance.)
The large uncertainty meant that at any one moment before the conceivable (but very unlikely) arrival of the body at or anywhere near the earth, there was a very large area of uncertainty, in which the asteroid's actual point of arrival would be one tiny and uncertain spot, and the possible trajectories leading to earth would be represented by another tiny blob (tiny relative to the whole area of uncertainty), most probably located very far away from the spot containing the real asteroid.
Calculations on real computers often represent an area of uncertainty like this by a nominal position that is very roughly at the centre of the area of uncertainty, accompanied by a measure of the size of the area of uncertainty.
The fact that one can physically read from the printed result and see that nominal position separately from its accompanying measure of uncertainty, because of the way the figures are presented on screen or paper, that does not give the nominal position any reality.
It happened that the nominal position first calculated in the case of AL00667 would have been (if of zero error) a trajectory heading for earth. But it wasn't of zero error, nor even close.
The whole scare looks like an artifact of the way in which uncertain results involving a continuum are presented using discrete digits.
-wb-
I've heard of Miss World, but how hot is Miss Earth? is she the Pornstar Miss World? Come to think of it I've never heard of AL00667, perhaps he is one of those mechanical fucking machines you see on the net. yeh that makes sense!
so you mean, like, the end of the world already happened? I knew that! we're already dead, and the "world" as we know it is just the Matrix, or... is that the life-after-death we're living now???
For a great novel about asteroid armageddon and the resulting collapse of society, read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's slow for the first half, but man, once that asteroid hits, it's sweet, sweet chaos.
That's fear for you!
I happen to agree with you wholeheartedly. When the clock needs re-winding, the Earth tends to clense itself. It's a cyclical thing; happened before, it'll happen again.
Cheers!
-Fl
what you would want to do is attaching some kind of nuclear device to it, which melts away pieces of its surface and with the gas and pressure created it slowly pushes the meteor (or comet) in another direction.
what exactly would the gas and pressure be pushing against? empty space?
Think, McFly, THINK.
It doesn't really matter if the symbols and magic numbers themselves mean anything. Not when the cold, hard fact of the matter is that there are hidden people with gobs of wealth, power and access to knowledge which rest of us only gets through a filter, if at all. When people like that are running the show, then hell yes, I'm going to stop and look up when I hear the number 666 added to an asteroid name or such.
Chicken or the Egg; after a while it doesn't matter. When it comes to broad metaphoric symbols, they still always tend to add up to the same thing. Self-fulfilling prophecy may be silly, but it remains a big deal when the people fulfilling it can affect everybody's life through their antics.
-FL
Please be advised that we are raising the Asteroid alert to code orange--high from yellow--elevated. This is due to intelligence that there may be big rocks nearby planning on heading in our general direction. Please be on the alert and double-check your umbrellas.
Damn! Must have text to pass the filter!
If it was AL00666 the doomsdayers would've been going nuts about how this is the event that will wipe out all of humanity.
;)
AL00667 reminds me of that "neighbour of the beast" joke
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
Unknown asteroid -- we can only guess at its composition and structure. We can only guess at the result if we tried to blow it up. It could shatter into a cloud of rubble. Said cloud of rubble would have the same average velocity as the original asteroid. Would having the Earth hit by a trillion tons of rubble be all that much better than being hit by a single trillion ton rock?
Your suggestion that a Ballistic Missile Defense could shoot down an incoming asteroid is laughable.
Ha ha
Ballistic Missile Defense systems aim at objects just barely out of the Earth's atmosphere. Even if they could be boosted to strike your incoming asteroid a couple of million kilometers in advance, how much diversion do you think even the biggest Nuke could do?
Would diverting the a planet killing asteroid be possible with the technology within our grasp? Sure, with decades or centuries of lead time. With enough lead time changing its delta-V just a centimeter per second would be enough.
Here is an exercise for the reader. An asteroid is headed straight for the center of the Earth. You have a diversion mechanism that can divert it one centimeter per second off course. How many seconds in advance should the asteroid to be diverted in order to miss the Earth?
If you RTFA, you will note that they are not tasked with detecting imminent threat NEO's at the last minute, and without confirmation. It would be irresponsible to even make such a prediction based on one set of observations made on one day, from one location.
They provided some not quite raw data to the industry/community, so that other observers could follow-up. They did their job. Maybe they could have done better, but apparently who ever wrote the software they are using could have done better as well.
They also removed the subtle doomsday prediction, since it would do nothing to improve the observations, and apparently, the updated prediction was closer to reality, unless we all missed a 30 m asteroid impact.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
so shut up.
Sounds a lot like the shamans, witch-doctors and priests (and more lately politicians) of our history, doesn't it?
These people are often nothing but power-hungry egomaniacs, sometimes outright sociopaths. Any secret knowledge they claim to have (but can never reveal except to the annointed) is just a scam with which to hold on to the power. The "masonic symbols", "magic numbers", "stone tablets" and the like are there just to shock-and-awe the unwashed masses.
It's you who give them their power if you keep looking up whenever you hear Apocalypse, Stonehenge or Kabbalah (thanks Madonna for getting my niece fall for silly mysticism...) mentioned. Don't play along.
It's always rubbish if you can't investigate it, question it or place it in some realistic context within modern science.
The owls are not what they seem
Everybody knows that if you want to stop a killer asteroid, all you have to do is change the gravitational constant of the universe for a few seconds. Trivial, really... Ow, my back!
I just can't get out of my mind that ludicrous ending where the aging Sen.Jellison dramatically gets up and sends his minions to "give our children the lightning!" Their idea of good government did not appeal much to me either.
... before its nearest approach. I remember last year, when an object near-misses Earth (I think it was bigger than our 667 friend). It was really close, in fact at that time, it was the one which was closer, about 120000 km (which didn't hit our planet). I don't remember the code, but that fact (the short distance of the fly-by) will help at finding out.
The problem: It was spotted TWO DAYS AFTER the nearest approach. Some scopes are needed in the southern hemisphere.
It seems to me that over the last few years I have heard a LOT of reports of asteroid near-misses - much more so than in the 80's or 90's. Unfortunately, I think it's going to take an asteroid/comet impact, over a population center, before the humans "in power" even begin to "get it."
Recent movies aside, the thought of a HUGE rock (or solid chunk of iron) falling from the sky, is so completely beyond the experience of most humans, as to be practically ludicrous.
"I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky." - Thomas Jefferson (supposedly)
--==>>BobT>
....new impact craters. Would make a great example why we need to put more funding into NEO observation as a whole.
Take a look at the B612 Foundation. They have a solid plan for testing our ability to alter an asteroid's orbit.
From: Alan W Harris Date: Tue Jan 13, 2004 7:24 pm Subject: "Turn out the lights"
Brian Marsden has substituted a different orbit that fits the observations within allowed uncertainties. There has been no added or re-worked astrometry, just a little push of the solution off the covariance minimum. On the one hand, this demonstrates that the limited observations so far are not sufficient to predict an impact with high probability. On the other hand, nothing has happened to invalidate the previous solution or reduce the probability that it is right. I'm reminded of an old pilot's story of how to do a forced landing at night in a populated area. The advice is that in order to avoid plowing into population on the ground, find a large dark area with no lights. If you're lucky it will be a field of some sort and you can do a dead-stick landing. As you approach, turn on your landing lights and see what's there. If you like what you see, go ahead and land. If you don't, turn off your lights.
A minor air-burst impact over the western US or eastern Europe should about do it, even if it ends up hitting a relatively desolate area and only kills a handful of people.
It won't take a full-scale disaster like an air-burst over Chicago or an ocean imact off of Tokyo, as long as somebody gets it on tape, it'll shake people up plenty.
However, putting that data out there in public so amateur asstronimers can narrow the orbit down ASAP is a GOOD IDEA. If they find out it will hit New York City, then every hour available to evacuate will save many lives.
Now if some official agency is aware that there will be a tungaska sized impact to a major metropolitain area and then decides to keep it secret, you can bet whatever moronic bureaucrat that decided that will be hung out to dry. We don't want official sky-is-falling press releases unless the sky really is falling, but raw data is not a warning, it's just astronomical data.
Eat at Joe's.
GEODSS first came up in 1982. It consisted of four sites (three today, budget cuts) worldwide, each with three 1-meter telescopes. The whole system is computer-run and reports to NORAD automatically. This was the beginning of automated astronomy.
The telescopes scan the whole sky every night, subtract out everything in the star catalog, and report unknown objects. New satellites and space junk are found this way. Even dark objects that occult stars are noted. There's also a more elaborate USAF site on Maui with even bigger computer-controlled telescopes.
Some of the sites have lasers (Maui definitely does) and can illuminate their targets using one telescope while looking at it with another. This allows time-of-flight ranging, photography of dark objects, and determining whether a satellite has cameras. But illumination is only useful for near earth satellites; it doesn't help with asteroid search.
Asteroid search is a spare-time activity of one of the GEODSS sites. They continue their real job for the USAF, looking for anything near the Earth that shouldn't be there.
The GEODSS hardware was updated in 1999, with better sensors, new computers (the 20 racks of PDP-11 hardware had to go), better positioning accuracy, and some infrared capability for working around cloud cover. The original main optics remain in use.
Your tax dollars at work.
To anyone that wants us to reduce our nuclear stockpiles to save humanity this has got to be an interesting problem. If we take this problem seriously, I can see the US government saying that the most powerful weapons developed thus far are not even a significant start towards protecting the Earth. We're going to need, like, a Really Big Boom to save us.
I can't wait to hear the non-nuke alternative suggestions for this one: "Let's build a giant water cannon in the North Atlantic--the Earth is mostly water, after all!". Once again, a disparaged human technological advance is going to be put to good use in a way no one had previously thought about.
sev
___
Start stem cell research NOW!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
and the process that astronomers went through to determine if the asteroid was or was not a threat.
Scientist: Heads or tails?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Remember, there are more humans alive today than at any point in the past. Assuming survival, there will be significantly more humans alive in the future than there are now.
Thus, should an event occur to kill off the species, it will happen at a point when there are more humans alive than ever before.
Therefore, for any given human, it is more probable than not to be alive for the extinction event.
We're doomed!
(Apologies to whichever author I (poorly) stole this from.)
On a more serious note, wouldn't it be nice if the US diverted funding from a politically showy but otherwise rather pointless manned mission to Mars to shanghai one of these 'near miss' asteroids into an Earth orbit, and begin space mining operations?
That is mostly because the LINEAR project has only been going on since 1997. LINEAR more than tripled the number of new discoveries being made.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't "playing along" entail maintaining an irrational fear of the 'evil' 666 number? I certainly don't do that. I DO, however, maintain a very rational awareness of groups who feel the need to pull 9-11 style stunts, or who engage in genocide because they believe they are the 'chosen' ones. I'm talking about reading massive social trends which are often, at their roots, based on irrational ideas. To pretend that those trends do not exist or that they will have no affect if only one pretends hard enough they do not exist is not only ineffective, but endangering.
Ignore Madonna, and look what happens to our kids. Whereas if people were to openly examine things and discuss them without fear or reactionary hostility, then the box of knowledge grows bigger, we have more to work with and the situation changes. The 'Ignore it' system only works if everybody young and old, decides to ignore Madonna. That's not realistic. Further, the 'Ignore it' system won't stop other groups from actively organizing along their lines of belief, and possibly, eventually affecting your life. The Palestinians are learning this as the Jews did before them.
The simple trick is to remain objective. To be a skeptic in the truest sense, (which I should add, is not the same breed at all as the hostile, "Skeptic's Dictionary" type, which is simply the other end of the scale of irrational belief).
Shutting things out only reduces the amount of available knowledge one has regarding the surrounding world. This limits options and reduces the ability to make informed actions.
It always pays to look and to gauge all aspects of the world if one wants to act responsibly within it.
-FL
In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though.
No way -- it really missed? I thought I was dead.
Slashdot: facts for hermits, stuff that's obvious.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Yes, but it could happen tomorrow or a million years from now. But the odds of it happening over a long period of time approach 1.
Once in xx years assumes even distribution of these events, but it is an average. The varience is large - so in fact any predictions in the short term are about as good as a poker bet.
But it would be safe to say it will eventually happen. Lets just hope it is far - far into the future.
The article calls for the data to be kept private until they are more sure about the orbit of the object supposedly to prevent alarming people by giving a false alarm. This IMO is dumb.
My reading indicates that they have quite an extensive peer review system of professional and amateur individuals checking the data and attempting to re-observe the objects. The system, if you RTFA, is designed to find large objects a LONG time before they hit. The raw data is keep somewhat private until they review it in a few days and then it is released. However, almost immediately after the data is processed they release several possible orbits that can be checked by observers on the other side of the planet before local sunrise. So, in a nutshell, your whole post in pointless.
What is pointless, is keeping raw data private. If amateurs can help find the orbits of suprise asteroids quicker then they should be able to view the data. We won't get much warning from asteroids between the sun and us. We probably won't see really small ones ( like tungaska sized ) until they are a day away from us. Speed is of the essence for these lil' ones ( and lil ones are the only ones worth monitoring anyway since they are the only ones for which an evacuation would be helpful )
Eat at Joe's.
What is pointless, is keeping raw data private.
Let's try this again. The raw data is "private" until they figure out that it's actually useful data and not absolute crap due to hardware, software or other random issues. You are annoyingly trying to argue that scientists release completely unverified data without taking even a single day to check that it's valid, even though they have immediately released an initial summary. My response to you is to go away, you have no idea what you are even talking about.
In Soviet Russia, the common good works for you!
Of course individual people have the right to privacy, and to keep their pet asteroid secret, but not publicly funded researchers especially when the primary public interest in asteroid watching is public safety.
Eat at Joe's.
Feel free to change definitions whenever it suits you, "Neo Thermic", if that IS your REAL name!! You started out talking about electron guns not working except in a vaccume [sic]. Now are you REALLY going to claim that SDI satellites need to be higher than 10000km above the earth's surface? You're not, are you?
You clown.
Releasing a summary, picking out the important bits and posting them after only one day sounds pointless.
That is not what they are doing, nor is it what I said they are doing and you are still complaining about something that isn't even happening.
1.) The chance of earth colliding with itself is 100% given enough time.
2.) The chance of a meteor hitting earth is increasing or decreasing depending on the confounding variable sample entropy set of the infinite universe and black holes.
3.) The moon will eventually collide with earth, that's why we want to go to mars. =) lol
4.) The earth will impact a meteor just as often as a meteor impacts earth... opps... help me spock... its circular logic... a busy loop.. going offline...
Would it be a "foo-fighter" in space also?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Hmm... maybe they should try Cold Fusion for their rockets as well ? :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
A "near-miss" as opposed to a "clear-miss" ... both are types of misses. "Near" modifys "miss"
A near-miss is a miss that came "near" to the target.
Misses can be near or far... but as for a hit, you either hit or don't... can't qualify a hit as "near" or "far"... well, except for "direct-hit."
Bottom line, it is either a "hit" or a "miss" and whatever you put in front of that term modifies it.... not changes it into the other.