Slashdot Mirror
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."
"100-ft diameter asteroid" ... "that Death Star-sized object"
:-)
If LINEAR can pick up 100ft dia objects, anything bigger would be easy. Now I can feel safe until this one veers off due our shoddy ozone, and smacks down on my hometown.
The Death Star was bigger than 100 ft dia! Maybe the miniature Lucas used was that size?
According to the article there are normally 2 of these every year. It seems a bit tongue-in-cheek to say "The important thing is not that it's happening, but that we detected it" [Chesley]. They were lucky, that's all.
:-)
It *will* give them a chance to study the thing as it passes, since all the other ones were only detected after they'd gone (and presumably therefore couldn't be easily studied). If it's close enough to see with binoculars, it ought to be possible to resolve quite well in a good optical 'scope.
The other point I guess is that it's only 100 ft across (why not 30m ?) so it would have burnt up on entry into the atmosphere, but still, good to know about these things. An asteroid that big would make quite some bang on entering the atmosphere, I reckon
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
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.
- Which should be shattering to all those who felt their Solar-model-with-lightbulb-as-sun was truely 'to scale.'
[caugh]How can this not be the 11th planet: it has a rather round orbit that is very similar to earths own?! [/caugh]Affleck was not immediately available for comment.
In related news, Ron Page now claims this was the 'NEA' he was referring to as terrorist last month.
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.....
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:)
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.
it was going to hit the earth and cause a massive extinction of the human race...
I highly doubt we will be told about it. Instead, our world leaders will gather in a cave somewhere with their mistresses and 500 years worth of refried beans...that ought to keep the human race going.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
"it is good to know NASA's LINEAR guys are on the job"
Yeah? What can they do to stop an asteroid a couple months before impact? Its better we didn't know if we don't have line of defence.
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*
Any astronomers out there know if this will have a measurable gravitational affect on the planet? I know it's awfully small on a planetary scale -- but it's mass might be great. And, as I understand it, we're pretty good at detecting gravitational shifts. I know there won't be high tides or coastal flooding -- just if an object that small will have ANY noticable effect.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
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. ;)
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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.
Sort of puts our achievements into perspective...
/. Where the truth
"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.
Section of an IAU Statement prepared by Dr. David Morrison, 14 March 1998
The International Astronomical Union's (http://www.intastun.org/) list of 108 known ''potentially hazardous objects,'' or PHOs.
Most of the asteroids that could strike the Earth and cause a global catastrophe have not yet been found. For the year 2028 (or any other year) the chances of an unknown asteroid hitting the Earth are much greater than the chances of this particular asteroid hitting. If an unknown asteroid should hit us, we would likely have no warning at all. The first we would know of the danger is when we saw the flash of light and felt the ground shake. At the current rate of discovery, it will take more than a century to find 90% or more of the objects this large with Earth-crossing orbits. For better or for worse, the astronomers who carry out these searches and orbit calculations work in the public eye. The idea that a threatening asteroid could be kept secret (or that anyone would want to keep it secret) is ludicrous.
For further information see the NASA asteroid and comet impact hazard website at:
For a long list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) see: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/PHACloseApp.h tml
Also, for information on assessment of the
impact risks using the Torino Scale, which is
kinda like the Richter Scale for impact risk,
see: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
from http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/
THE SAGA OF ASTEROID AL00667 = 2004 AS1
Brian G. Marsden (from CCNet, 15 January 2004)
"That this latest PHA should have generated so much heated discussion on numerous mailing lists and the internet on the basis of four observations covering a time interval of one hour on the morning of Jan. 13 is surely quite amazing. On the routine arrival of the night's LINEAR data at the Minor Planet Center at 5:15 p.m. EST that day, the usual computations on them were quickly done, and, within a matter of minutes, five of the objects were placed on the MPC's WWW "NEO Confirmation Page" as being of potential NEO interest, predictions of the expected positions and their uncertainties being provided in the hope of securing early confirmation from observers in Europe. It was evidently cloudy over most of the continent, however, and the only follow-up observations immediately forthcoming were in fact from a single observer in the U.K. Also according to usual procedures, on the receipt of these U.K. observations, the predictions on the WWW could be quickly and significantly refined, well in time for further observations to be presumably made from North America. There was in fact also rather extensive cloud cover that night over North America, particularly over the numerous professional and amateur observatories in the frequently blessed Southwest.
At this rate of asteroids getting closer and closer, we're due for impact next month!
_________ Help me get a PSP!
If you hear the thunder, that means the lighting didn't kill you.
When struck by lightning people hardly ever die immediately. Most of the time the residual effects will kill you over the duration of a year or so.
If you hear the gunshot, the bullet didn't kill you.
So if I shoot you in the heart, you die immediately? The soundwaves would likely hit you at seemingly the same time as the bullet. I seemed to think that a gunshot wound to the heart or lungs that went untreaed wouldn't kill you for at least 5 minutes.
If you smell the engine burning, the car wreck didn't kill you.
Once again, the vital organ thing. Unless your brain suffers damage, fatal damage to your vital organs takes a few minutes to kill you.
If you are still reading, the asteroid missed.
Actually, the asteroid just hit me. you lose.
will one hit us already, the suspense is killing me.
I always wanted a seaview from my city apartment.
A 100-ft diameter asteroid will make the closest (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters)
If "feet" or "earth diameters" are not your preferred units of measurement, what the article is trying to say is that the asteroid is about 90m in diameter and will pass the earth at a distance of about 42600 km.
)9TSS
Someone in Europe, Asia, or in the water should take pictures for the rest of us to enjoy!
Thanks!
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...
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/linear.html isn't working for me...
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
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
What are they going to do ? Send Bruce Willis up to save us ?
Wow, I had a dream about an asteroid hitting the earth the other morning [being a dream sequence, all laws of physics are suspended]. I went outside and everybody was looking at the horizon and this round, crater covered cliche' asteroid was coming right at us, and then it just passed right overhead (that was a big relief!). After a few orbits and just as it was about to plunge into the earth it all turned into a Wallace & Grommit clamation scene, so it cratered in claymation with a big sucking noise and out from a ring around the impact area, up popped a bunch of advertisements for stuff.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think the whole be an optimist in the face of absolute danger concept was lost on you. And it is "if you hear the bullet whistle, you aren't shot" or something to that effect, as when you hear the whistle it means if flew past you.
Sleep is for the weak.
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.
Dude, you need to get out more often. 100km is about an hour's worth of driving at highway speeds (or about 40 minutes worth if there aren't any cops out.)
Basically, you're off by about three magnitudes: Jupiter isn't 140km in diameter, it's around 143,000km.
Makes me hope Paul at the lab made good grades in math:P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
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.
...it became apparent their initial impression had been wrong. Said they: "That's no asteroid. It's a space station."
-- thinkyhead software and media
From what I am reading in the articles on the net, 100 feet can still create some serious, albeit localized damage. If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction. Anyone out there serious about their astronomy?
The Tunguska Blast over Siberia was an object about 100 meters in diameter. Sure it burned up in the atmosphere, but it was devastating to the ground anyway. This article also mentions that at about 50 meters, these rocks make it through the atmosphere and can do serious localized damage. So, since 100 feet converts to is 30.48 meters, this rock would more than likely to have an effect that we will notice on the ground.
For further reading, here is a site that has already compiled links and information And, of course, the Yahoo listings on Earth Impact information online.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
An 80ft asteroid caused Meteor Crater at 1.2km wide. A 100ft one may likewise not burn up. Meteor Crater
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.
The JPL web page about this asteroid gives a diagram of its orbit, and it is mostly within the Earth's orbit. They don't say whether the picture is the "before" or "after" picture --- the pass near Earth changes its direction by 15 degrees, which will make a noticeable change to its orbit.
Plug in some numbers and find out :)
copper
"Near miss? It's a near hit! A collission is a near miss. BOOM! Look, they nearly missed"
-George Carlin
SPAM
Amatuer astronomers continue to make significant contributions to the field. It was an amatuer who first noticed that al0667 might hit the earth and it was another amatuer who recorded the key observation that placed the same object on a safe trajectory. If you're serious about wanting to help spot these things, you can start here.
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 "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?
Really these NEA are like a universal strip tease rather then big rocks of death. Imagine parking a couple of these things in orbit, we could mine it out and turn it into a space station. We could even use it as to start a human colony in orbit. If it was slightly bigger that is. :/
That good fellow is going to pass quite close to earth. Now, the question I have is, how close does an asteroid such as this have to pass so that it is captured by Earth's gravitational field and become a satellite? It could be useful to have a big rock in stable orbit.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
"the object is ~30kmmeters across"
not 30 kmmeters. 30 meters. I dont think this qualifies as a planet, compared to the approx 1700km diameter of Sedna...
are you a troll or what?
geo-synchronous satellite. 26km is just about their orbit. Shouldn't we try to protect them?!?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
What so they can have healthy foody AND a clean energy source
The heading doesn't say the current 100 ft object is Death Star-sized. It says the author is glad LINEAR will be on the job for the time when one that large comes by.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Haven't you seen Blackhawk Down?
"A his means it's close, a snap-" And then the shooting started.
Presumably, a snap is not close.
boom boom boom
THIS may come to pass.
Bullet wounds often cause hydrostatic shock, so you may very well get nasty brain hemorrhaging from a bullet shot to the torso.
"If you hear the thunder, that means the lighting didn't kill you.
When struck by lightning people hardly ever die immediately. Most of the time the residual effects will kill you over the duration of a year or so."
Either way, your ear drums explode, and people never hear (they hardly even remember) the "lighting".
"If you hear the gunshot, the bullet didn't kill you.
So if I shoot you in the heart, you die immediately? The soundwaves would likely hit you at seemingly the same time as the bullet. I seemed to think that a gunshot wound to the heart or lungs that went untreaed wouldn't kill you for at least 5 minutes.
"
You need to study what happens with sound waves more, if the bullet is supersonic, and it hits you in the brain, there isn't a chance you'd hear it, even if you survived, you wouldn't hear it due to the fact your in the noise "cone".
"If you smell the engine burning, the car wreck didn't kill you.
Once again, the vital organ thing. Unless your brain suffers damage, fatal damage to your vital organs takes a few minutes to kill you."
I think he meant as in instant death. If your brain is squishyed, you wouldn't hear anything, even if you survived, if your neck is broken, you wouldn't smell anything.
"If you are still reading, the asteroid missed.
Actually, the asteroid just hit me. you lose."
Doubtful, the asteroid of this size would explode in the atmosphere, demolitioning everything underneath it. This happen in Siberia a few years back, looked like someone dropped a N-bomb, but it was from the shockwaves. A direct hit would be possible if your in that new high altitude plane..
Mod +5 Drunk
Wow, that leaves me remarkably free of warm fuzzy feelings.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction.
Actually, it would do much, much more damage if it hit the water than if it hit land. If it were to hit land, it would completely destroy a (relatively) small area, killing up to a few thousand people (depending on the population density of where it hit).
If it were to hit water, on the other hand, the resulting wave would potentially wipe out hundreds of kilometers of shoreline on either side of the ocean, killing far more people and destroying much more property. Also, there would be a delay of several minutes, or even hours (depending on where it hit) between impact in the ocean and the actual tidal waves hitting the shore. Imagine the panic as millions of people tried to flee the shoreline areas. The deaths, injury, and destruction from that panic alone would rival the toll of a land-bound impact, before the tidal wave even arrived!
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
What about aiming a nuke at it? a little test of the actual first hand effects of detonating a nuke on the surface of an oncoming asteriod would be a useful experiment. Modified trajectory, actual damage incurred... this would be a great opportunity!
IANALOOA
Look at the facts and deduce your answer. I didn't have time to googleconfirm any of this, so I assume the risks of some numerical errors.
... there may even be a small core, or it may end up being a rubble pile after most of the ices burn away. The 1908 Tunguska event was probably a small comet, which exploded in the strato- or tropo-sphere. Still, it caused enormous damage in a vast ellipse over Siberia.)
... about 16 times the forces ever encountered by Mir or Skylab.
... that it probably won't "burn up". But we must allow for the chances of mid-entry detonation.
Man-made objects that come down are very light, hollow and fairly slow. Asteroids and comets are guaranteed to be the opposite.
Asteroids are 2 different types: metallic, stony and finally "carbonaceous chondrite". The metallic are essentially chunks of nickel-iron. The stony are just rock. And the CC types are rocky but composed significantly of some ices and other nearly-organic material.
(Comets are mostly icy material with some rocky inclusions
Knowing these things, we can perhaps make some deductions.
A 100ft object of asteroidal material (often compacted rubble) probably weighs at most 120LB per cubic foot. I say this since 150LB/ft3 is a good rule of thumb for any rock you pick up on Earth. Hence, assuming a roughly spherical shape, the object will weigh ~31000 tons.
The largest man-made object to destructively re-enter couldn't have exceeded 100 tons. Hence, the object is over 300 times more massive.
It is also coming in at interplanetary speeds; since these tend to be about 30km/s, and orbit is about 7km/s, then it will encounter (30/7)^2 more resistance upon re-entry
Opposing that: 300 times the mass. I can only imagine that the mass will win.
Now, "win" means that it will overpower destructive re-entry
This depends on what type of asteriodal material that the 30m object is, and how that material is arranged. The less metallic, and the more rubblized, then the greater the chances that it will explode, and the higher up it will do so. Even at 31kt mass, re-entry is harsh enough to force streams of plasma into even small cracks, and the pressure can crack it open along many fault lines. With volatile ices stuffed through the object, this becomes even more explosive.
Overall, even not knowing the object's composition except to bet that it's asteroidal and not cometary, I'd say that if it did aim for the Earth, we'd be in for at least a huge explosion in the upper atmosphere. I don't have the equations sitting before me, but such an explosion can be in the ten-megaton range. But this explosion can happen anytime before it strikes the ground.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Either there's an ever increasing number of asteroids coming ever closer to Earth (unlikely methinks)
Actually, I've been wondering about this lately, and perhaps some Slashdotters can confirm/deny my observations:
I've always been a sky-watcher. Since before I was in school, I've been looking at the sky. Many summer nights I've spent looking for meteors, etc. So for the past 20 odd years, I've been regularly looking up at night. Often for hours at a time.
Now, in the past year or so, I've noticed a lot more fireballs than usual. For those that don't know, fireballs are like a shooting star, but instead of a short, dim streak, you see something that lasts several seconds and is a LOT brighter. Essentially, things with more mass/lower speeds that last a lot longer before burning up. I haven't been looking up more often, in fact a lot less now that I'm back in school. But I'm finding that at least once a month (sometimes several times in a night) I see a fireball. Not because I'm staring up for hours at a time - I'm talking while driving home, or going out on the porch for a breath of air for 5 minutes.
When I was a kid/young adult, most nights I'd be lucky to catch 1 or 2 shooting stars an hour. A fireball maybe once a year, and it was very memorable. These days, I'm hardly looking up and yet I see regular fireballs, sometimes as often as 2 or 3 in a night.
I realize this is entirely unscientific, but it's freaking me out. Before this past year (other than the wonderful Leonids in 2001), I think in my life I'd seen maybe a dozen fireballs. In the past year alone, I've seen easily that many. I've not seen anyone else mention this online (or obviously in mainstream news), just wondering if anyone else out in Slashdot land has noticed the same thing.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Back in my Army SSDC days our main geosynchronous comms satellites were on a 22,300 mile orbit. This thing is going to pass just above. Suddenly these 26,500 miles don't look *that* far to me.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
"From out of space, comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the moon, unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old. A world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice. With his companions, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword, against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!"
(thanks IMDB)
Uh, no.
The parent is entirely correct. Incoming meteors have enough velocity that the air on the front is actually compressed to a solid with a complete vacuum behind. The pressure differential very efficiently transfers the reentry energy to the material of the meteor, causing it to explode with enormous force.
The Tunguska explosion of 1908 is now believed to have been a stone asteroid about 100 feet in diameter that blew up through this very mechanism.
If this metor had been a stone one, we'd have seen a nice recreation of the Tunguska blast. Had it occurred over a populated area, it would have been equivalent to a multimegaton nuke going off.
Time to retreat to the United Heekee Society..
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.
It wouldn't matter. See my other post in this thread here. We couldn't do anything about it anyway; we don't have the equipment and even if we had a Saturn V to bolt onto this thing and fire, it wouldn't give it enough delta-V to help unless we'd detected it in time to get the rocket there and firing at least weeks in advance.
It's not that the schools have failed, it's just that Matrix has won. Or was it the terrorists? Ahh, forget it.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I may be reading the impact risk table wrong, but right now it seems to say that the distance it will miss by on Jan 12, 2053 is .01 earth radius. I assume that this means that we are very near the center of the area of uncertainty about where it will impact, and that the areo of uncertainty is currently extremely large.
On the other hand, I seem to recall that most previous predicted near misses had us further out from the centroid, and as the orbital data was refined, the area of uncertainty shrank until we were no longer in it. I suspect that reducing the uncertainty without changing the orbital prediction would raise the calculated risk with time.
As I read it the impact energy would be about equal to a 300Kiloton bomb. Not a particularly large hazard area if it came straight down (it probably won't), but it would certainly be big enough to mess up somebody's day. For that matter, has anyone actually run a prediction of what the effects (thermal, weather, etc.) would be from a grazing strike where it travelled parallel to the surface for a long way before breaking up or leaving the atmosphere?
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
It takes the earth about 6 minutes to travel a distance equivalent of its own diameter.
So basically, to avoid a direct hit, the the timing of of a near-earth-asteroid only needs to be altered by 6 minutes over the course of its orbit(s).
What I can't get over is that we *missed* this asteroid by only 12 to 18 minutes!
That's just crazy.
Yep 30 Kilo-millimeters. Same thing.
Oh, and put a warning on the wall outlets - "Caution 115,000 millivolts" while you're at it.
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
Slashdot just had a story a couple of days ago about finding ways to detect/destroy planet-killer asteroids. There were a lot of comments to the tune of "well the odds are really low of being killed by an asteroid, so we should cure cancer instead because rocket scientists can easily slide into that position." Does this asteroid open your eyes a bit?
The chances of Earth being hit by an asteroid aren't one in a million. They're one in two. That's right, 1:2. Either we will be hit or we will not. The variable is when. Question is: Do you want to bet your species on it, or do you want to be prepared?
Sorry for the rant guys, still got a little bit of steam to blow off from people trying to downplay asteroid impacts with odds. The truth is, we just can't see far enough to have enough time to do something about it. I'm hoping that more funding and technology make their way towards watching the sky a little more carefully.
"Derp de derp."
I swear they come up with the worst FUD ever.
Congress told them to scan for only objects 1km or larger. They are out there finding pebbles. The Siberian Explosion has never been confirmed to have actually been an asteroid, and not only that, but it'd be nigh impossible to determine the actual size of it.
Not really a troll. He's just trying to be funny. If you read his subject, his intention was to be like a sarcastic version of the (awful!) movie Armageddon with Ben Afflec. It seems obvious when you realize that the original article IS ABOUT NEA 2004 FH. This is NOT another asteroid!
And if you click the 30 km mmeters link, it goes to a Google conversion of 30,000 meters equalling 30 meters. All just silliness. Laugh?
IOW, when armageddon comes - i.e., the LARGE object visits - we'll have a few hours notice.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Rev 8:10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
Rev 8:11 And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
Rev 8:12 And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.
Now just hope they don't name some asteroid "Wormwood".
These asteroids keep getting closer and closer, until someday .... bang!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
even a non-fatal hit totally messes up your senses e.g. when Agent Smith shoots Neo the phone ringing goes quiet.
/.ers can relate to this easily. It's a difference quoting a movie to prove something, as opposed to just illustrate a point. Hollywood even though it dramatizes things, sometimes do make good illustrations of life problems.
and
This guy quotes reality, based on what he's seen on The Matrix.
I don't think he based his statement on what he's seen on the Matrix. The statement he used is true (shock messing up the senses), he just used Matrix as an example, since most
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
because of another metric conversion error! :(
If we even have a 100m ball of iron heading our way at 30km/s, that ball of Iron would have the kinetic energy of ~2e19J. And since on megaton of TNT is 4.18e15J, then the ball of iron has the energy of 4500 megatons of TNT!! How the hell are we suppose to defend against that (with today's technology)??? We can't even hit the damn thing, not to mention changing its orbit!!
If the same ball of iron travels at 40km/s, then it has the energy of 18000 megatons of TNT!!
Of course, most of the crap flying around might be (is) significantly larger than that. Anyway, until we can move asteroids around at will, there is really no point in finding objects that threaten us - WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THEM!!!
Futhermore, more people will probably end up dead as a result of stress that these "discoveries" do to people.
I say we ignore these things until we can actually do something about them (a sign of actually be able to do something about asteroids might be when people finally have a mining operation on an asteroid. Or ability to use something better (stronger, faster, cheaper, safer :) than chemical rocket....
When at least it comes to asteroids, ignorance is bliss ... for now (or next few dacedes!) :)
It's a rock the size of a football field moving at over ***36 000 km/hr***. How do you stop something like that, besides blocking it with the earth? And if you do, but the rock contains frozen organisms (bacteria, virus, or think Aliens) which we release, then the gift horse has become a Trojan horse!
(Later, while NASA continued to track this pebble, a rock six times the size of the sun came by and hit the Earth head-on. The entire planet became completely smashed up and is now a minor blemish of dirt on the face of the big rock. Oh well.)
100 feet makes it significantly smaller than Tunguska, which was theorized to be 50 to 80 meters. So, it is a city killer, not a planet killer.
"Oh - we'll blow it up. That'll make it go away."
Wrong. Mass and inertia are mass and inertia. The results might be a bit different - a dense solid object will tend to penetrate the surface a bbit deeper, but the heat generated from a billion tons of sand travelling 14 miles a second would instantly superheat the atmosphere, and the impact on the earth would be incredibley destructive - the silicon, magnesium, sodium, etc. in the stuff isn't going to disappear, and the associated mass has to transfer its inertia into some other form of energy, and a billion tons of inertia is a billion tons of inertia.
The best thing to do is to a solid chunk is to deflect it. If the asteroid is solid metal and valuable metal at that, it might be a good idea to dump it on the moon or Mars, where the metal can be used to make buildings and space craft.
Otherwise, pitch the sucker into the sun. Or Venus. Or someplace else. In fact dumping it into Venus might be cool - see what kind of wreckage develops...
Now, if it's a loose piece of crap, like a semi-shattered dead comet, that would*suck* because deflecting something like that would be pretty difficult. A billion tons of ice and gravel is still a billion tons of ice and gravel.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
No, the odds are 1:1 -- Earth will be hit by at least one asteroid. Will it hit in our lifetime? Probably. Will it be big enough to notice? Probably not.
;)
But I'm betting on the asteroid. And buying a lot of duct tape.
...is also the wood from which Absinthe is derived.
So more likely than being an asteroid, its a poetic reference to substance abuse.
"and the waters became wormwood (absinthe); and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter".
(Absinthe addiction causes profound psychological depression, "bitterness".)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I think they'd agree that one (or two) came closer.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
I don't know what are you talking about in this sentence :
The pressure differential very efficiently transfers the reentry energy to the material of the meteor, causing it to explode with enormous force.
(a)Why "pressure differential" can "efficiently transfer" "reentry energy" to the material of the meteor?
(b) What is "reentry energy"?
(c) Why does tranferring energy into the meteor cause it to explode? (Adding energy to any system does not cause it to explode, it just, uh, adds energy.)
And, the whole thread is really a bit besides the point anyway. A 100ft thing heading straight into earth's path will have a relative velocity of, maybe, about 30km/s, may even be faster (or slower) depending on its orbit aroudn the sun. Earth's orbit at around 30km/s, which is where I took my number.
The earth's effective atmosphere is about 200-250 km (also about where Skylab is orbiting). That gives it about 8 secs travel time : I don't see what physical mechanism, can burn a 100ft thing in 8 secs. This meteor, my friends, is going to hit the ground. And that means a nice E=1/2 m v^2 release of explosive energy. A few nukes I guess (I don't know the explosive power of nukes nowadays....)
And, say, if you can really invent some mechanism to "explode" the meteor up in the atmosphere, the energy release will still be the same. I.e. it's like doing a Nuke Test in the sky....and we all know what THAT can do.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
this article made me realise that if comets are sometimes made of ice, then water obviously exists in other solar systems, hence very probably life. mod me down for being OT if you want, but i thought i might as well share it, as i will forget in a few mins anyway.
http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWdeathstarsizes.html
Death Star I diameter: ~ 120km Death Star II diameter: ~ 270km
-Vendal Thornheart
With NASA's decrepit budget they're probably still using old intel's with the floating point problems. i.e. 3.4 Earth_diamaters_away = collision Or actually, more realistically, there probably is no asteroid at all, at least not one in this galaxy.
You mean except for all the asteroids that have hit throughout Earth's history. Certainly the bolide which skipped off the Earth's atmosphere in the 1970s came much closer than 3.4 Earth diameters, since the Earth's atmosphere doesn't extend anywhere near that far.
"in competition for resources with any other animal/s, we win"
:
2 words for you
Rats. Cockroaches.
and that just what come from the top of my head!
I won't even go into maritime life...
Just a thing you should know... When they tested the firsts A bombs, they had the surprise of finding that the cockroaches and the scorpions survived through it...
Scorpions, by the way, also survive beeing "deeply frozen".
I'm so sorry I could never collect my bet on you after you get formal proof 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
What about the one the killed the Dinosaurs?
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
The first sentence had me worried that the asteroid might hit Earth. So I breathed a sigh of relief when the second sentence said "the object" was "using a good pair of binoculars." That means it will be able to see us and avoid us. Thank God!
of an old Shadowrun storybook? While I always doubted it's possible to get some heavy things up in the sky with appropiate costs, some guys could decide to take a few pieces of such an object to position them in the orbit. Such they'd be able to "throw" them on targets on the earth's surface, with quite a little economical effort - makes a perfect tactical weapon with good destruction and no radiation...
Well, you know, something in me says that faced with the immenent destruction of our entire race, we could get pretty resourceful. Besides, we don't need to get *people* to the rock, we just need to get a few H-Bombs up there. If the military can hit a tiny little bunker on the other side of the planet, surely they can put their skills to good use and nail a few hundred foot asteroid.
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
Isn't it much too pessimistic to believe that we'll be totally defenseless for centuries?
If we had a warning time of a few days, that would be sufficient to calculate targeting information to launch a few ICBMs to intercept an incoming rock. The intercept would take place above the atmosphere (some ICBMs are suborbital, and some of them are able to put payloads in orbit).
With a bit longer warning time (a few months), we could fit a more powerful launch vehicle (say, a Titan IV) with a nuclear warhead. This would allow the intercept to take place well away from the earth (reducing the magnitude of the angular deflection needed to make the object miss Earth entirely).
And with a few years' warning time (and a few billion dollars), more sophisticated approaches than a brute-force nuclear attack could be implemented. (I.e., attaching ion engines to the asteroid in order to change its orbit, or painting it white in order to make the increased reflection of sunlight subtly change its orbit.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
With what? We *do* *not* *have* *boosters* that can even take h-bombs out there.
We're getting, at best, a week's notice. If we had a booster ON THE PAD, ready to go, when we discovered the asteroid, we still couldn't do anything about it. If it's on an elliptical solar orbit, we'll get practically no warning, maybe a day. If we launched instantly, the thing would be within a few hours of impacting when the bomb got to it.
The bomb isn't going to do much, either. In space, a bomb is just an energy release. Unless it hits very close to the object, it's not going to deflect it AT ALL. So you've got an object coming in at perhaps a mile per second or faster, our rocket going outwards at a mile per second, we don't have really solid ephemeris on the rock so we don't know exactly where it is, and we need to hit it within a hundred yards.
This is a much different proposition than hitting a stationary target that we know to the inch where it is.
Even if we got an h-bomb to blow up on the surface, so what? Bombs do not erase mass from the universe, they just break it up or redirect it.
The mass will still be going the same speed, and will dump the same energy into the Earth when it hits.
With only a few hours to a day before impact, the mass will still hit the earth. We don't have good enough data to know where it will hit, and we can't guarantee what vector a bomb will impart to the object; we might take something that was going to hit the desert and steer it into Las Vegas.
I think we should keep impact defense in mind as we develop technology. But building a system strictly for this purpose would be a waste. Building it as part of an outward expansion system would be much more sensible. If we had a lunar base that was used for asteroid mining, then we would have:
- lunar telescopes that could find these things WAY earlier and with WAY more accuracy
- mass boosters intended to move asteroids.
THAT would make sense to do; it would have a payback even if we never encountered a major impactor.
Also, getting humans off the earth is the only SURE way to survive whatever happens to the Earth. Of course, this is very long term; there's no way we're going to have viable, self-sustaing colonies for hundreds of years yet. But it's a nice goal.