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Asteroid to Make Closest Recorded Pass to Earth
unassimilatible writes "A 100-ft diameter asteroid will make the closest (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters) pass of earth ever detected in advance today, NASA reports. Asteroid 2004 FH's point of closest approach with the Earth will be over the South Atlantic Ocean. Using a good pair of binoculars, the object will be bright enough to be seen during this close approach from areas of Europe, Asia and most of the Southern Hemisphere. While we are in no danger this time, it is good to know NASA's LINEAR guys are on the job, for when that Death Star-sized object pays us a visit."
Time to dust off the "Thumb" and see if I can get off this godforsaken mudball.
Is the asteroid construction-equipment yellow, with lots of lumps?
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If you hear the thunder, that means the lighting didn't kill you.
If you hear the gunshot, the bullet didn't kill you.
If you smell the engine burning, the car wreck didn't kill you.
If you are still reading, the asteroid missed.
At which point we will hide behind our moon and send a squadron of George Bush sponsered space monkeys to penetetrate it's interior and fire photon blasters into a two meter hole to destroy it and save the earth.....
Will it miss? Hollywood always taught me that killer asteroids come equipped with state of the art in tracking with the cross hairs firmly locked onto an American city like New York.
Hollywood special effects must have made a mistake this time around.
Ok so in the future we will know when a 100km diameter asteroid is gonna hit earth. Problem is, there is shitall we can do about it. I personally would rather not know when my time is up then sit and worry..
oh wait... screw that. If I knew the end of time was coming I'd l00t! Cuz that's what all good capitalist swine do!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I cant believe its gonna miss! Now i cant throw my wicked end-of-the-world orgy-party! *sigh*
bush as the source of the next wave of humanity?? evolution would be set back 100,000 years.
It would be like going back to the caveman!
So that we can all enjoy the peace-of-mind of knowing that we're all about to die, in advance. ;)
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"Using a good pair of binoculars, the object will be bright enough to be seen during this close approach from areas of Europe, Asia and most of the Southern Hemisphere."
Great. Now even the Universe hates America.
The first one is not a miss, it's just used for calibration. The second will be create a 10 cm crater but its organic content will exterminate all life on this miserable rock.
At this rate of asteroids getting closer and closer, we're due for impact next month!
_________ Help me get a PSP!
will one hit us already, the suspense is killing me.
I always wanted a seaview from my city apartment.
Imagine what the cave would smell like after 500 years of refried bean consumption.
Come to think of it, I can't think of a better fate for our 'leaders'.
how much the asteroid will tug the earth?
Are you serious?
100 foot diamater. Thats smaller than bunker hill.
20 busses parked together and loaded with people from Overeaters Anonymous would probably have more mass...
What are they going to do ? Send Bruce Willis up to save us ?
...NASA officials say they detected the asteroid after it hit a parked car in Queens....
Either there's an ever increasing number of asteroids coming ever closer to Earth (unlikely methinks) or this is truly indicative of how blind we have been all thse years to what was happpening in space.
Or God is sending us warning shots across the bow.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
"Near miss? It's a near hit! A collission is a near miss. BOOM! Look, they nearly missed"
-George Carlin
SPAM
Read the article - it was discovered on Monday. That would have barely given our politicians enough time to argue over whether it's Osama's fault or not, let alone do something constructive.
I have an acquaintance. Call him...Jack. (Name changed to protect the obsessed.) Jack has picked two goddamn things about which we can do absolutely nothing to freak him out: near-Earth asteroids and megavolcanoes. He was my friend's boss for a while, and we ended up at a lot of the same parties and restaurants and such. He would always corner me, because I was usually the only aerospace engineer there, and talk for hours about how life as we know it was shortly going to be wiped out by a really big rock, and how this was the greatest threat ever to face humanity.
After this happened a couple of times, I told him that I was comfortable playing the odds that an extinction-level event would hold off for the couple of centuries it would take us to actually be able to deal with it, given the scale of geologic time time to human achievement. He nearly spit his beer across the room.
In conclusion: Space is really big, really empty, and some people just need things to worry about.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
100-ft = 90m?????
You didn't have anything to do with the previous NASA Mars mission did you?
No, you can't wash your face in my sig!
100-ft "asteroids", teeny-weenie new "planets" .. the solar-system is going to hell in a hand-cart these days. Couldn't we get some of those hot super-jovians like other solar-systems have?
What a classic /. response. This guy quotes reality, based on what he's seen on The Matrix.
Our schools have failed.
We have a whole fleet of people who have grown up practicing on the USS Triangle using vector based simulation software (asteroids).
e.
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Because NASA is part of our "stupid american" culture.
While I agree your culture is stupid, don't them sciencey types use metric pretty much universally?
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
The death star in Star Wars was able to shatter a planet to pieces. One can calculate that the energy needed to overcome the gravitational pull is about G*rho^2*r^5, where G=the gravitational constant, rho the planet's density, and r its radius. For an earth-sized planet, that amounts to 1e30 J, or 6e13 kg of matter to be converted into energy. If the Death Star were completely consisting of concentrated antimatter, then it would have been 3 km in diameter and be able to fire exactly one shot. Yes, that is more than 100 ft. :)
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Dammit,
So near and..yet so far!!
I presume, there are intersting gravity experiments that could be set up with it though.
Won't someone _please_ think of the satellites?!?!
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne