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City-Sized Asteroid to Pass Earth This Fall

Posted by michael on from the horseshoes-and-hand-grenades dept.

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.

14 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Sure. It'll miss. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    But, they fail to mention that it is of such size as to have sufficient gravity that when it passes, it will rip the oceans from the face of the earth and carry them off into space.

    All you doubters are gonna be mighty thirsty. It's going to be a hot dry 2005!

  2. But miss!?! by LqqkOut · · Score: 5, Funny
    > Will approach - but miss - Earth.

    ACK! "But Miss" sounds like a negative statement. I, for one, wouldn't feel the least bit sad if we're excluded from the city-sized-meteor-strikes-planet team.

    --

    -- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!

  3. Hmmm by sv25 · · Score: 5, Funny

    All of these misses... Geez, the universe sure does have bad aim!

  4. Re:City sized? by Caseylite · · Score: 5, Informative

    A little under 5 square miles, according to the article. Culver City, California Alma, Texas Lexington, South Carolina Pine Ridge, South Carolina Lake Worth, Florida In other words, a small city.

  5. Seem familiar.. Did they run out of names? by douthat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We've seen Toutatis before:

    1989, 1992, 2004

    http://www.iki.rssi.ru/solar/eng/toutatis.htm

    Oh! it looks like this headline will come every four years... just enough time for people to forget :)

    Check it out

    --
    She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF ...
  6. Re:City sized? by PopCulture · · Score: 5, Informative

    Toutatis is about 2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide (4.6 by 2.4 kilometers).

    So its probably closer in size to downtown Rose Bud, Arkansas (certainly excluding the busteling suburban Rose Bud outlying areas)

    --

    Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
  7. God of War by sssmashy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Asterix and Obelix fans may recall that Toutatis, a name frequently invoked by those indomitable Gauls, is in fact the ancient French god of war, growth and prosperity.

    Invoking Toutatis during battle was supposed to bring about certain victory for the pre-Christian French warriors. Which is why it is such an appropriate moniker for a comet that appears just once every 500 years... ;-)

    1. Re:God of War by This+is+outrageous! · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Behind the name :

      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...

      --
      This is...

      O
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      !

  8. Re:City sized? by metlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ofcourse! Actually, you are quite right in the last count.

    Figuring out the path is not the issue, doing something about it is. Unfortunately, even if the space organizations did figure out (I do not know if they have already figured this out or not, yet), there is no guarantee that they will make it public for a while.

    Nothing better to stir up those religious zealots saying that in FooBar years the world is going to come to an end. And even the saner public would most certainly be quite paranoid if such a prediction were to come to pass.

    That is what makes it far worse than actually knowing about it - a large segment of the population may still remain ignorant and oblivious to this. And given the brilliant red-tape that exists in most government agencies, I really wonder if we would be doing anything about it (except, ofcourse, fund a bunch of religious institutions and proclaim that some voice in the sky is going to save us all).

  9. Yup by fiannaFailMan · · Score: 5, Funny

    The dinosaurs are extinct cos they didn't have a space programme.

    --
    Drill baby drill - on Mars
  10. Re:City sized? by wronskyMan · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, but if it hits, how many VW Beetles worth of damage will it cause?

    --
    --- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
  11. Bottom of the seventh... by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny


    And another swing and a miss by the Kuiper belt, the Kuiper belt is batting a .0000001 ERA against small blue planets over the course of this aeon. Of course the last hit that wasn't called foul was a grand-slam homer which cleared the field for a couple of seasons.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  12. Re:We should be safe... by Fearless+Freep · · Score: 5, Funny

    God does not play dice with the universe... ...He plays billiards

  13. Re:What would be left after 60 million years? by dustmite · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient

    Aren't you mixing the concepts of "sentient" and "intelligent" a bit? It seems quite plausible (and perhaps even reasonable to assume) that many less intelligent Earth animals than us (e.g. dogs or pigs or elephants) are sentient, but they don't have the intelligence required for creating complex industrialised civilisations.

    Hmm .. if we assume they had built cities or perhaps even small villages, how much evidence of those structures would remain today? Probably nothing if they had reached about the same level of technological advancement that humans were in the year 1900. Even big things like pyramids will probably be long gone (unless buried?). Now we have things like plastics and huge landfills, yet even most modern plastics degrade in "only" tens of millions of years. If humans vanished off the face of the Earth today, I think our buildings and other structures will be long gone in 60 million years, even a long-developed area such as London will probably have been reclaimed by trees, plants, grass etc. However, we will definitely have permanently altered virtually all of the planet's ecosystems, that will be evident. And certain spots where there are high densities of pollutants (e.g. plastics or chemical pollutants) will probably still have higher densities of those things, leaving evidence of their locations. The crumbled rubble of huge cities like London or New York will, if buried over time, probably leave some sort of permanent layer of sediment with "interesting" chemical make-up.

    So that's a weird thought, if dinosaurs had reached 1900-levels of technology, and lived in cities and villages and had a global trade system, there might actually be virtually no evidence of it now. Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't thought about it much.