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Closest Ever Asteroid Passage Revealed
tricaric writes "Another asteroid passed, last March 31st, close to the Earth. This time it was only about 2 Earth radii from the Earth. The observation have been published only a few days ago, because 'Although the observed arc is only 44 minutes, the orbit is quite determinate and, given the exceptional nature of this close approach, the object is now receiving a designation.' Check out the ORSA animation!"
I think I liked it better when I was blissfully ignorant of our impending doom.
If you read the article you can see that the asteroid was extremely small and would have broken up in the atmosphere.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Wouldn't it be prudent to put in the story text that the object is estimated to be only 6 meters in diameter?
The article states that an object that size would burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. I'm not sure if that's correct or not... a 6 meter hunk of material would probably rain at least SOME material down on the ground, but I don't know if it would make a crater.
The point is that we didn't just narrowly escape certain doom... it was a small rock.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
Another asteroid passed, last March 31st, close to the Earth. This time it was only about 2 Earth radii from the Earth.
Earth! That's where I keep all my stuff!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I can't remember if it passed our orbit 6 hrs before we would have reached that point, or 6 hrs after we passed that point.
Basically, this latest asteroid is a lot closer.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
The original observations posted to the Harvard project site were pulled. I'm guessing they feared
controversies such as have occurred in the recent past when estimates were revised to preclude impact.
I think hiding the data is irresponsible in all cases, and it makes me distrust astronomers across the board.
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check out the 1972 daylight fireball. It came so close it actually skipped off the atmosphere. There are plenty of other close encounters in the literature that came well before this.
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Well, the Tunguska event of 1908 is a case of one of these actually hitting the planet- though I guess it doesn't qualify as a "passage".
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So due to the Heisenberg / Uncertainty Principle it would have hit us if we had not measured its trajectory, right?
github.com/chrispollitt
And hadn't been a small asteroid, then I could be dead now, and in heaven reading slashdot, and not know about it.
I think this is a bit of a non-story. So this is the closest observed asteroid that hasn't actually hit us
The funny thing is if this had hit us it wouldn't have made the news, unless it had hit someone famous, and only if they were doing something scandalous at the time.
The wierd electrical fires in Sicily were more interesting.
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.. I read somewhere that our atmosphere will protect us from anything upto the size of a house. As this rock is about the size of my living room I don't think it would have dome much damage.
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
I think hiding the data is irresponsible in all cases, and it makes me distrust astronomers across the board.
Yeah, I know that when software engineers at one college/university hide data, it makes me distrust software engineers across the board. After all, if one person or institution is doing it, they all are, right?
Consider what might happen if this particular rock did hit us. 6 meters isn't enough to wipe out a city and it's unlikely that it would have hit in a populated area. Assuming that it didn't kill or hurt anyone, it might have been a good thing if it hit the ground.
Why? Because a big, fat, headline making impact (or splash) would really catch everyone's attention. A miss just catches our (the nreds') interest for a bit. If people perceive that there is an actual threat, perhaps space exploration and planetary defense will be taken seriously for a change.
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My eyes kept getting wider and wider! Granted, I wasn't aware of the object's size when I saw it, but still!
In case you miss it, those little circles around Earth that you can't even read when the animation begins are the orbits of geosynchronous satellites, such that provide GPS, weather images, and satellite TV!
It's an animated GIF, btw.
It's a bloody rock, is what that is.
If you want to call that an asteroid, then this is also an asteroid? This was a meteor that passed right through Earth's atmosphere in 1976, with a perehelion of 58,000 metres.
Although, I think the point here is that this is the closest observed astronomically. It's like seeing the meteor before it hits the atmosphere, I guess. Anyway, the astronomers are all in a tizzy over it, so that must be a good thing.
This isn't good, as far as I'm concerned - yeah, ok, it was misleading as it was really small, but the issue here is that these things can do hit us and come near us.
I think that watching everything and everyone burn to death all at once would be a hell of a way to go - it's time we paid more attention to this stuff, though I admit it's a bit of a no-way situation, as Sagan eloquently describes in, "Pale Blue Dot".