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City-Sized Asteroid to Pass Earth This Fall
FiniteLoop sends a collection of links about a city-sized asteroid named Toutatis which will approach - but miss - Earth this September. MSNBC also has a story, and JPL and the Near Earth Object program have more information.
Where can I get a Celestia add-on for this asteroid?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I always thought it would be cool to catch one of these asteroids and plunk it into a nice orbit for scavanging or using as a huge horkin' space station. However nudging it into orbit would be bad if you misjudged and plunked it down on someone (which in turn could be a great way to get rid of somebody you don't like and make it look like an accident, but that is another story).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Is this going to set stuff off? The Ocean Tides? Car Alarms?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
is to nuke or nudge.
Too bad we cant capture it and put it in a lagrange point.
Makes more sense to do it that way than shuttle all the crap up from earth....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
I think it's a very interesting question.
If "they" tell us, they can be sure that the whole world is going to break down: riots, suicides, etc... pretty much a total collapse of social structure.
The reasons not to? First of all, it's mean (unethical). Second of all, what if letting the problem be known could potentially help solve it?
I think that, in this case, if I were "they" and it was absolutely known and confirmed that impact would kill everyone on the planet, I would go ahead and let the news out. Let everyone have some fun before they all die at the same time...
Nike. Just jew it.
Considering that Asterix and Obelisk come from France and are hugely popular there, coupled with the fact that the asteroid was discovered by French astronomers, and it's probably less ironic and more of a sly nod to the series.
Also note that the Gauls often feared that the sky might fall on their head. Let's just hope they were wrong !
> What scares me is the following line from the site -
>>Researchers can't predict far enough into the future to rule out Toutatis ever
>>slamming into Earth, so it is listed officially as a Potentially Hazardous
>>Asteroid. NASA says it won't hit for at least the next six centuries.
Yes, the solar system is actually chaotic. It is only slightly chaotic, and orbital periods are very long, so I doubt that this is much of a concern.
BTW, if one ever does reach an orbit that will collide with us, we will have something useful to do with all those nukes, no?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
With my somewhat limited knowledge of orbital mechanics (i.e I've taken classical mechanics and played KSpaceDuel a bunch), it seems the best way to handle this is not to try to move the asteroid on approach, but to propell it further away from earth on it's outward leg of orbit. Say we knew asteroid $FOO was going to strike earth in 2020, 5 orbits from now. we would use far less fuel nudging it faster as it left past Earth (and hence into a larger orbit) than trying to decelerate and/or modify the orbit of a huge rock heading our way.
Of course, we're still trying to move several million metric tons of iron with what amounts to an overgrown bottle rocket, so what do I know?
By 1989, I had already started numbering Apollo objects using gaulish gods. One which I had not used was Toutatis since I thought it was an invention of Goscinny and Uderzo, authors of the well known comic book series "Les aventures d'Asterix". There are several dozens sites about this comic book series, you may want to look at few of them :
One of their constant saying is "By Toutatis", another one is that their only fear is that the sky may fall onto their heads.
I discovered my ignorance of gaulish culture when I learned that Toutatis was ( or had been ) a real God. I also learned that the citation in Asterix was not a joke, but that it had been reported by some historians of Alexander the great who had met some gaulish warriors ( who had once invaded Italy and Great Britain ).
One of the first thing we learned about Toutatis was its record low inclination. This meant that it is indeed ( in a remote future ) a good candidate to fall onto our heads. The name stuck almost immediately at the telescope when I proposed it. Toutatis, also sometimes spelled "teutates" is a totemic deity, to which human sacrifices were made.
Don't be misled, very few french persons do know about the cruel god Toutatis, but most will talk to you about Asterix and his friends if you come to swear " By Toutatis ! ", provided you get the right (i.e. french) accent...
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If it were going to hit us? They probably wouldn't tell anyone, since they can't do anything about it anyway. You'd just see a suspicious number of politicians planning to spend some vacation time in "our underground bunker in the mountains."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"...it will zoom by our planet within a million miles, or about four times the distance to the Moon."
It would be cool if they could plant monitoring devices and instruments on it and then collect the data when it comes back around in four years.
Dustin - A different story...
and steer it to L4 or L5 for materials.
For all the people worring about massive worldwide destruction, have a gander at the Asteroid Impact Simulator
...then you're looking at some pretty serious earthquakes and lots of broken windows within a 1000-km radius, but the worst damage would be confined to about a 250-km radius.
Assumptions:
-- the asteroid would be travelling at a "typical" velocity on impact, or about 17 km/s
-- the asteroid is primarily composed of dense rock, rather than solid iron
-- it impacts Earth at about a 45-degree angle
-- it hits land, not water (actually not too likely, considering Earth's surface is 75% water)
Of course, this also assumes that the asteroid wouldn't break apart in the atmosphere. This thing isn't the most stable, solid asteroid ever -- the space.com article even makes mention of how narrow its "waist" is, and that it might simply be two large chunks that collided gently, sticking together because of gravity. If that's the case, it would almost certainly break apart and its impact wouldn't be nearly as severe.
It would take a much bigger space rock than this to wipe out humanity.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient, what evidence would they have left behind that they had built cities, space programs etc.? Would a reptilian Vesuvius survive for 60 million years? Would we recognize it as such if we found it?
Thank you for the link! I have read Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, where he discusses something like this.
Well, but I said that 600 years is short because -
1. We need to get off this rock at a short notice, not just a few of us but most of us.
2. We would need to either have good space stations that can sustain us (short term) or terra-form a nearby planet (within our reach) or find a way to travel to another sector of the galaxy containing planets that are Earth-like. Remember, we will be going away for good.
3. Assuming that our population merely doubles, and we make spaceships that will take just half of the people away, each capable of 10,000 people (which is quite a reasonably high estimate) - we will need 500,000 ships. Thats an awful lot of resources that will be needed, both energy and material.
4. I have completely ignored the need for us to save such things as historical artifacts and memoirs from the home, etc. This is merely for the people.
The scale for such a transfer would be staggering, and no matter how advanced we are, we will need -
(a) Star Trek like travel (Warp/transporters)
(b) Steady yet reliable source of food and energy
(c) Sufficient space for such an endeavour
(d) Sufficient *time* for such an endeavour
Therefore, no matter what, it will be a really really mammoth task - could atleast take 50+ years. We take years to build a freeway, or a skyscraper. Assuming we somehow have cool technology that could make this even 10000x faster, we will still need atleast 50-100 years for something on this scale to be built.
Hence my argument that six centuries is an awfully short time!
*whew*
Howdy all,
Reading this article got me thinking about how often we hear about these 'near-misses' well odds are we had just as many 'near-misses' for the last 100 years.
Well I witnessed a very unusual event about 21 years ago.
I was "camping" in our back yard with a school-chum (we were about 10 years old at the time) and late in the night (11pm - 1am Eastern) We saw in the south-west sky (Southern Ontario near Detroit, MI) a bright orange object. (Bright orange because it was obviously in the semi-shadow of the Earth, bent light thing)
It was about the size of a soccer-ball (held 4' away) and very high in the sky. We saw it BOUNCE twice and disappear over the western horizon.
No flames from the atmosphere, but it was covered with impact craters. (It looked like a mini version of the moon) Very cool stuff that I will never forget.
Who/Where/How can I bring this to (vague information and all) to find out exactly what it was? I don't remember hearing anything about it in the news the next day, but I was probably more interested in GI Joe.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Nukes would do nothing!
An asteroid the size of Tautatis traveling at cosmic velocities would puncture the earth. It would take less than a second for it to hit the crust after it entered the atmosphere.
Everything withing 150 miles would be burned from the asteroid vaporizing. The blast would follow at almost the speed of light.
You would die from the heat or the blast before you would even hear it.
That is just the impact, all sorts of seizmic activity could occur in the time after.
As for nuclear missle launch, the rockets attached to nuclear missles do not have enough power to escape earths atmosphere, and if they did, they are not designed for space.
Above all of that it would create all sorts of nasty fallout when the smaller size chunks of the nuclear asteroid fell all over the earth.
By the way, they are practically invisible, and we constantly discover new ones flying by.
It's all good.
Why would you teraform a lifeless rock and move billions of people to it if you can just move the asteroid a bit and avoid it hitting the earth? 600 years is plenty of time to develop the technology to do this, and enough time to do it slowly (minimum energy expenditure). I've heard some ideas that merely changing the light reflectivity of the rock would change its orbit.
AccountKiller
Well, given that this thred was started by a superconductivity guy, it seems only natural to ask, how about inducing an itty bitty (relatively) current across said asteroid if it is indeed mostly iron (some aren't, ya know) and try to get the induced magnetic field aligned to get it to shift path within the solar system's ambient fields? After all, we're talking about a LONG period of time and a tiny shift in direction. I'm too lazy to do the numbers, but seems to me that rockets of any sort might be a needlessly brute force approach. (And yes, I *did* just reread Flynn's Lodestar .)
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.