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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.
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...
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.
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
Um, the problem with that is the whole concept is to be dealing with targets launched from earth, at earth based targets.
Meaning they'd be pointing in the wrong direction.
you wouldn't want to destroy such a beast. several pieces of rock flying towards earth are after all even more dangerous than one big stone -- even if the big rock would be way bigger than the small ones :-)
:-)
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.
it would be like pushing a huge ship away with your hands, whilte it is just floating in the water: probably slow, but it would definitely work. there's no (relevant) opposing force in space
So instead of one huge target you could in principle land on, you'd get a swarm of smaller but still deadly rocks that would rain devastation on Earth?
No, the only permanent solution to the extinction level event problem is to get some of us off this goddamn planet.
The owls are not what they seem
The news told me everything was good and everybody was happy, so I really don't see your point :)
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.
do you really think a global cataclysm would make people work together for the common good more than they do today? Or is it more likely that resources would become greatly limited so humans would be more likely to kill each other for their own good? While human life is still a struggle for resources, I doubt the red cross was around in the caveman days, helping the guy who got clubbed on the head and had his dinner stolen.
If anarchy is ever declared...
...ask under what authority the "declaration" was made.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
But that assumes an absolutely perfect, dead-on impact trajectory taking the most direct path from space to surface, and hitting at a ninety-degree angle. Most space debris will fall into the atmosphere at an angle, which will drastically increase the amount of time it's exposed to atmospheric friction.
Why do you think shooting stars seem to streak a long way across the sky?
Clearly they are very much on the ball.
It's amazing that they can make accurate
observations and orbital calculations on a
30 meter object so far out. I can't imagine
why anyone would be complaining about the
process when it is working so brilliantly.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
So instead of one huge target you could in principle land on, you'd get a swarm of smaller but still deadly rocks that would rain devastation on Earth?
I've always wondered about this. If I have a chunk of rock 1 km in diameter hurtling toward the earth, wouldn't it be better to break it up into small chunks so it would be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere? Even though the mass is the same, the surface area presented to the atmosphere would be greatly increased, which would be much more efficient at ablating away mass and slowing down the incoming pieces (transferring energy to the atmosphere instead of into making a crater).
Where's the trade-off point between distributed death from all the smaller chunks and increased burnup in the atmosphere?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.