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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."
"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.
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
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!
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
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
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...
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 ?
I find it amusing that a threat to everyone thats a far bigger catastrophe than terrorism has no defence (I'm British, this is our spelling 8P ). In all likelyhood (imho) its the biggest continents that will suffer the most. The UK will either just be wiped out or get missed entirely (we've always had bad weather)...
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.
Jupiter being 140km?
Crikey, that puts a 2km cycle to work in perspective. No wonder I'm always turning up late!
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
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.
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
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.
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!
geo-synchronous satellite. 26km is just about their orbit. Shouldn't we try to protect them?!?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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, &
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???
Intelligent life evolved from chimp-like creatures once. It could happen a second time.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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.]
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
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.
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.
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".
"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.