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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.