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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."
Honestly, who cares? If an asteroid hits, I promise, you won't feel a thing.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
they'll be able to tell us in advance we're all going to die and there's damn all they can do to stop it. Still, I guess that's a better excuse for a really reprehensible party than most:)
We're all going to die eventually. But throughout all of history, mankind has yearned for the day when we all get to die at the same time. It's not as scary as dying alone, or as scary as the thought the world will go on without us.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I suppose our best "defense" would be to evacuate as much of the impact area as possible. Nuclear winter theories aren't as respected as they used to be.
G
Is there a LINEAR@Home type thing? I would prefer to use my spare cpu cycles protecting life on earth. "meta-environmentalism" I guess.
meh
Er.... volume is 4/3 pi r^3. pi r ^ 2 is area.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Imagine if you will that this thing actually penetrated the atmosphere. Okay - so it wouldn't reach ground, but there would likely be a fairly significant blast (this one is only about 1/3 to 2/3 the diameter of the Tunguska object, and that one made a hellish blast).
Imagine now that this penetrated the atmosphere over, say, North Korea, or the Sea of Japan, or somewhere over India/Pakistan. It is not much of a stretch to suggest that this might precipitate a limited nuclear exchange. Not a for-sure, but enough of a "could-be" that somebody's day could be ruined.
This is why it is important to look for (small) potentially hazardous objects - not because they will (directly) cause the extinction of the human race, but because they could precipitate an all-too-human conflict, just out of ignorance.
Note also that, as good a job as LINEAR and others do, there is a class of asteroids that are damn hard to see form the ground - the "Aten"-class asteroids, which orbit mostly inside earths orbit and thus come at us from out of the sun. These ones also need to be catalogued and a watchfull eye kept out for.
So, when people start to ask the value of asteroid hunting, bring up these ideas. Sadly, nuclear war is a much more real threat to most people compared to mass extinction.
And that's exactly why NASA has lost so many Mars probes: the Imperial System
1 in = 25.4 mm
1 ft = 12 in
1 yd = 3 ft
1 fm = 2 yd
1 rod = 5 1/2 yds
1 chain = 4 rod
1 fur = 10 chain
1 mile = 8 fur
I.E. 100 ft = 30.48 m and 26500 miles is, quite correclty, roughly 42600 (42638.5) km.
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
If we hadn't wasted billions of dollars on the Space Shuttle we might have the technology now to travel out to that asteroid, and park it in earth orbit. If it is mostly metal then it would be a bonanza grab. And if not, it would make a fine space station. *sigh*
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
Hmm, except that this one was detected Monday. 3 days notice isn't enough to do anything. Larger ones should be detected earlier but how much earlier?
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Why would our world leaders have anything to do with it? It is the scientists that know what is going on, and the people that they would tell, in this order would be 1) other astronomers, 2) their families 3) the politicians 4) the journalists. There would be enough people that knew about it before the politicians that it would be impossible to cover up even if they wanted to.
You forgot Gauss's theorem. You should estimate the gravitational effect by measuring distances to the center of the earth, not its surface.
:)
Tides are caused by the gravitational effect of the sun and the moon on the whole surface of the earth, not on a single point. Let's assume a flat distribution of water on earth's surface. Gauss says that the gravitational force applied to a sphere is equal to the force applied to the same mass positioned at the center of the sphere.
Now, the relevant comparison would be to estimate the relative gravitational effect of our asteroid and the sun. Mass(A)=5x10^7kg, Distance(A)=5x10^7m, Mass(S)=2x10^20kg, Distance(S)=1.5x10^11m. The sun's gravity field on earth is 1,600 times higher than our asteroid's.
So yes, the asteroid will have a negligible effect on earth's surface but not THAT negligible and not for the same reason. Using your logic, my mother (200kg) would have a higher gravitational impact on earth's surface than the sun provided she hovers less than 150m above the surface. Ok, she's fat but not THAT fat
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
If both bodies were the same shape the larger would have eight times the volume.
As for mass, Barringer was definitely iron which makes it comparitively rare - less than 6% of observed meteorite falls are iron, yet they make up over 80% of collected meteorites. The latter number is easy to explain - iron meteorites don't look anything like rocks found on Earth, the much more common stony meteorites (which form over 80% of all observed falls) are very hard to distinguish from the stuff on the ground.
More than likely this is a stony body which would give it a much lower density - round about 3.6 gcm-3 as opposed to 7.9 gcm-3 in iron meteorites.
Having said that - a lump of stone that size hitting the Earth would still be comparable to a hydrogen bomb going off - as you say it would have spoiled a whole lot of people's days.
Best wishes,
Mike.
We have no technology that can deflect an asteroid that's going to hit anytime soon. We can't even GET to an asteroid that's going to hit us unless we detect it several orbits back. If it's going to hit soon, then it's so far away that we can't get to it with any booster that we currently have with enough mass to make any difference.
Hell, we don't even have a booster that could get people to the moon anymore, and even if we still had operational Saturn V's, they still wouldn't boost enough mass out of Earth's gravity well to move a rock that big.
If we had a moon base (far shallower gravity well), and had big ass boosters there (which we wouldn't; why would we have such a thing?) AND we detected an impactor several YEARS early, we might be able to do something. But if we have a significant impactor in the next 100 years or so, we're pretty much fsck'd. Just have your wild party and watch the shock wave come at you at the end.