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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.
So that we can all enjoy the peace-of-mind of knowing that we're all about to die, in advance. ;)
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
"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.
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'.
...NASA officials say they detected the asteroid after it hit a parked car in Queens....
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.
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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