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Asteroid 4179 Toutatis Will Miss Earth, This Time
EtherAlchemist writes "National Geographic News reports in this story that a giant, peanut shaped asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will pass within 1 million miles of Earth on Weds, the 29th. When it does, it will be the closest any known object of this size (3 miles) has passed near Earth in this century. No worry about impact yet, it should pose no threat until at least 2562. An interesting note: the asteroid believed to have caused Earth's biggest mass extinction is thought to have been between 3.7 and 7.5 miles as reported here in 2001." 2004 FU162 came closer, but is a much smaller object.
I could have sworn people have been talking about this asteroid for months...
When it does, it will be the closest any known object of this size (3 miles) has passed near Earth in this century.
Wow! You mean to tell me it's the largest object to pass near here in over 3 years!!!
OK, one of those things that sounds impressive, then when one thinks a little, isn't all that big a deal...
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
So close to not having to pay next months rent
the asteroid runs linux, so we dont have to worry about it crashing, right nerds?
sorry bad one
1. Just load an ICBM with gallons of white paint and smash the missile onto the asteroid. (This method works for small asteroids.) The light from the sun will push the newly painted asteroid onto a different flight path.
2. Load an ICBM with a hydrogen bomb. Smash the missile into the asteroid.
All is well.
what if we knew for sure we would be hit in 500 years? that's long enough to be none of our problems. so would people say "fuck them" and just leave it to some other generation to sort out, or be willing to pay for a huge programme to deflect/destroy it?
it's a similar problem to global warming, except there are no asteroid-impact-dependent business models funding research and laws like with oil.
... seems the sky missed us this time! ;)
Alright people...call off the Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis-led rescue team.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new oven-roasted overlords...
Here's the proof. Free 27" flatscreen TV.
It's the closest any known object of this size has passed near Earth in this millenium!!!
Forget Death star check the Death Peanut.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
The mean distance between the Earth and moon is 384,400 kilometers. 1,000,000 miles is about 1,609,000 kilometers, so the asteroid will come within about 4.2 earth-moon distances.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
I'm getting kind of sick of this type of story. It seems like every few months their are stories released about some space object coming close to earth and 'just barely missing'.
Though I am curious to know if their is an official plan for countering a colliding asteriod? What would our options be realistically if an asteriod going to impact in a matter of months?
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
I was looking forward to the free tacos.
Maybe next time.
the giant, peanut shaped asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will pass within 1 million miles of
I hope it doesn't miss the chocolate bar asteroid known only in my hopes and dreams
The Earth is about 7000 miles in diameter (read small), we are a pretty insignificant rock in space for anything to hit, unfortunately.
NASA's NEO (Near Earth Object) program tracks many different objects, though I wish they had a bigger budget, then they could handle even more.
That is the meaning of the grandparent post.
So, will it be larger or smaller the next time around?
telling the public would be stupid... so we won't know about it
Not at all. The news would probably leak out, and there would still be a panic.
What you really want to do is tell people about the rock, but tell them it'll just a be a near miss, a million miles or some such. Nothing to worry about.
Wouldn't it be easier to say 6 to 12 Km?
I think the only way to effectively deal with an oncoming asteroid are:
1) Send a lander out that anchors and deploys a large solar sail, using the power of the suns particles to divert the asteroid.
2) Send a lander out that attaches an array of small (comparably) rockets that slowly alter the course of the asteroid. Much tougher on an asteroid such as this one that tumbles on two axis'.
Unfortunatlely, both are unlikely to succeed because they need a long time to work, and we never see these things until it's a little too late...
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
..but ther might be another, quite catastrophic, development looming in the near future. It has been a couple of decades now that the number of powerful tornadoes has been increasing steadily. A Pentagon-commissioned report lists all the risks we are facing: disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet, disruption of north Atlantic stream, disappearance of Bangladesh and parts of the US east coast, famine due to drought and lack of arable land, disappearance of the south and central american rainforests. The Pentagon is worried that ultimately someone's going to press the big red button.
sigh.
An interesting note: the asteroid believed to have caused Earth's biggest mass extinction is thought to have been between 3.7 and 7.5 miles as reported here in 2001
I was just watching something the other day on the History channel about a recent find. A huge lot of dinosaurs buried under meters of volcanic ash - sort of hinting a giant volcano blast may have done all the dirt work.
I tried to google for some more info, but came up empty-handed. I did find this article though, about dinosaurs found in Alaska. It states that if they had managed to adapt to an arctic environment, then the "nuclear winter" effect of a large meteor hitting earth may not hold as much water.
Then again, I doubt we'll ever truly know - maybe the dinosaurs just got tired of living and went the way of the Heaven's Gate members.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Anatomically modern humans have been around about a hundred thousand years. That's roughly five or six THOUSAND generations. The chances that we get smacked by an asteroid within the lifetime of the first couple of generations that actually have a chance to see it coming is remote.
Yes, it would be bad.
Yes, it's going to happen if we don't stop it.
No, it's not going to happen in your lifetime.
No, I'm not giving you lots of money to try to stop one with primitive turn-of-the-millennium technology. When legitimate investments in space travel bring the cost of launch down and our robotics/sensors are better and our deep space propulsion systems are better, THEN I'll vote for spending money on a decent system.
Or I would, if I wasn't going to die in the global bio-weapons apocalypse of 2027.
But for good effect, it needs to apply over extended period of time. So you need early warning. With the speeds of these objects, that means looking into deep space in all directions, so that you see the thing coming, months or years ahead. And there's the problem: roughly speaking, we are looking, but not too closely. And when something is spotted, the game plan isn't ready either.
That is quite the appropriate letter sequence for an asteroid that comes close to earth.
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
And to think that the only thing I used to fear was that the sky would fall on my head.
Why?
Because a billion tons of gravel travelling at 25,000 miles per hour is just as deadly as a billion ton chunk of rock travelling at 25,000 miles per hour. It's not the rock itself that's the problem. It's the kinetic energy from the object's mass that's the problem. Gravel - rock - it's all the same at 25,000 miles per hour...
The only way a nuke really would work would be if it were small enough to nudge it off course, wihich would mean getting a BIG lead time on it. and that assumes that the asteroid is solid. It seems a lot of them aren't all thet well put together and a nuke would only turn the bullet/asteroid into a shotgun blast, per my previous description.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...and park it at one of the Lagrange points? Something that massive would be much better for an international space station than a few hundred tons in low earth orbit, and it would provide more than enough shielding for any conceivable solar flare.
I'm not sure about that. Blasting the asteroid into gravel would greatly increase its total surface area. More surface area + same velocity = more heat generated from friction with the atmosphere. Therefore more of its mass would burn up before striking the earth.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Gravel - rock - it's all the same at 25,000 miles per hour...
Until it hits the atmosphere, at which point the gravel particles vaporize due to the friction of re-entry.
A few months back this rock was for sale on Ebay. The link no longer works so I can't post it. But there was a strange puzzle on the link. The puzzle lead everyone at http://www.forums.metaunlimited.com/viewtopic.php? p=1698&sid=f830243e623dcef49c07484dba7c7b35#16 98 to think this is an Alternate Reality Game http://www.argeuro.net/. Then we found http://www.orbitalcolony.com/ confirming that this is in fact an ARG. So the question is...
Is this asteriod SlashDot is talking about real or fiction. Come play along with us an have fun!!
I call bull.
It isn't clear to what the orientation is compared (...an observer on a fixed point on Earth?, ...a fixed point in the asteroid's orbital plane?), but at some point it will have the same orientation with regard to anything in a periodic motion relative to it.
Let's take the simple example of the plane of it's orbit (ignoring pertubations caused by other objects: if you consider them, you'd come to the conclusion that no objects ever repeat their orientation toward one another, since there must be some object that moves in a non-periodic way relative to any of them -- even within periodic systems, the N-body problem has not been shown to have perfectly periodic solutions):
It rotates on two axis with a period of 5.4 and 7.3 Earth days. Let's assume those figures are exact. It thus rotates ten times on each axis in 54 and 73 days, respectively. In 54*73 = 3942 days, it rotates on one axis 54*73/5.4 = 730 times, and on the other 54*73/7.3 = 540 times. Nice, whole numbers, reflecting the same orientation toward the plane of it's orbit (around the sun).
Dividing by 10, in 394.2 days it rotates 73 times around one axis and 54 time around the other. As 54 and 73 are coprime (sharing no common factors except 1), this is the shortest interval in which it repeats it's orientation with respect to the plane of it's orbit around the sun.
We can use the same process to compare it's location in it's orbit around the sun, with the Earth's orbit around the sun, and the position of a person on the surface of the Earth, as it rotates about it's axis. We could even account for the precession of the Earth's axis if we wished. In every case, there is some interval in which the person has rotated about the Earth's axis an integral number of times, the Earth has revolved around the sun an integral number of times, the asteroid has revolved around the sun an integral number of times, and has rotated about each of it's axis an integral number of times. This only fails if one of the periods (of rotation or revolution) is irrational. But, even then, you can find the interval between repeated orientations to an arbitrary degree of precision.
You could've hired me.
Wouldn't have much problem. The pod could maneuver away quickly. When will we host our sentiences in defensive pod? Then we can get back to libertarian politics.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Detonate them in its path and stear it off course into the moon or somewhere else. Almost all our ICBMs leave the atmosphere as it is, and once they leave, it wouldn't take much to guide them where we want them. It would be one hell of a light show for sure.
What if two nukes were sent. One to break the astroid into thousands of pieces and the second to distribute those pieces over a greater amount of area?
Even if such an object hit Earth, I seriously doubt that it would lead to human extinction. In fact, it probably won't even kill as many people as the tens, or possibly even hundreds, of millions we have killed during the 20th century in two world wars, many other wars, and persistent indifference to humanitarian crises of famine or disease. This may be a young crowd, but those of us old enough who have grown up during the heat of the cold war will probably have less to worry about from a meteor hitting than all those tens of thousands of ICBM the USA and USSR seemed willing to unleash on each other and everyone at a very short notice.
Many species survived many mass extinction events, and, ironically and in fact, many of such species have been, or are being, driven to extinction by none other than us. Soon we will have successfully driven biodiversity to the minimum we have allowed to survive because we want it, such as dairy and poultry farms, and pets.
I am willing to bet that the last surviving species on Earth will be humans and microbes.
Im curious how did earth rurvive so long with all that mass moving around in space...Because we will have to deal with a situation like that sooner or later, will we be ready??? Somehow i don't think it's as easy as nuking it.
Oh no! A gigant... mmmmmm, peanuts....
I will take a page out of contemporary "leadership" and show those space rocks who the boss is!
Now look whose winning! 1million miles! Ha try harder next time.
...we'll just go through the star gate....
> Therefore more of its mass would burn up before striking the earth.
And dump the heat into the atmosphere. Congratulations you have just managed to convert the energy from a kinetic impact into a heat event probably affecting a much wider range than before.
The choices
A) smashed: solid ground absorbes energy
B) broiled: atmosphere absorbs energy
I believe I would be behind the idea 100% if there was open source software and a celebrity involved. Could we get Mario to do this? Maybe fill up his little water-squirter backpack with white paint? How 'bout starting a project on sourceforge to reprogram the backpack? We could call it Open Asteroid Squirter.
-
Surely we can find some way to blame terrorists for this. Especially so close to election time! :)
Some people (like, I don't know... SETI) periodically release reports like these in order to ensure funding and the existance of their jobs.
A bit like our President and his terror alerts.
Hilarious! :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere or oceans, so most of those things simply won't happen - lots of dust goes ballistic and lands, a chunk of the moon's surface gets vaporized (ok, causing a temporary localized atmosphere of sorts, but not enough to care about), and the dust covers some existing craters, but if there's a new crater on a side of the moon we can see, maybe it'd be deep enough to get some real insight about the inside of the moon.
Certainly lots of business for astronomers for a while. It'd be much more annoying if it hit the far side of the moon where we can only see it from spaceships.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
it actually runs gentoo. It's still compiling as we speak. That's why it avoided us, so it can finish its compile.
...and kiss your ass goodbye
But if you have asteroids of smaller size, they will burn up much easily in the earth's atmosphere, would they not? If you have on giant asteroid, the burnup in the atmosphere would have little effect. Something to consider before discouting the "blowing up" idea.
A blog like any other.
It's its, not it's orbit, etc, etc.
Perhaps the orbits are erratic? Perhaps the journalist got the summary wrong?
Does anyone ever run trajectory calculations for a strike on the Moon, rather than Earth? And what size Moon strike would cause problems here? Could the moon eject a chunk in our direction sufficiently large to be a problem? For that matter, what would happen to the Moon in that situation?
Too many questions -- no idea of the impact (pun intended.)
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
...but every time I see one of these stories, I think of some extremely long-lived alien warlord interns having a conversation like this:
Braxxis009A - "Idiots! How many times do I have to tell you anthropods even a trillionth of a degree of miscalculation will cause a complete and total miss! Now reload the Meteoro 2000 Planet Blaster XL with another rock and GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME!!!!"
Does anyone know whether this rock has been around a really long time, or whether it's a chunk broken off a larger chunk? What happens if it breaks in two just as its rotation slings one end of it right at us?
Well, as someone else said, we don't need any help; we're doing a really good job of murdering the planet all by ourselves.
Today, I determined that I would not get hit by the Q32 bus and it would miss me by a full block and half. I am studying it's path to see if future drive bys will result in me getting run over.
News has gotten boring, they have to report what doesn't happen.
-- "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke" - Opus
It all depends on how big it is, how fast it is, and where it is going, where it gets turned to gravel and how big the gravel is. If it is far enough out most of the gravel will completely miss, if it is too close in it and a lot of it will simply be like worrying whether a puppy will be hurt more by a shotgun or .44 at medium range.
There's a lot of room between the rocks out there. If something is big and fast the earths gravity won't change its course much to pull it in, we are a moving target, and nothing is aiming for us anyway.
Just in case the human race is still here in 2562 (I know - a longshot), wouldn't it be prudent to try to break it up into smaller pieces now? Although I guess this would require foresight beyond that of which dumb beasts that destroy the planet they live on for profit are capable of.
Must-not-watch TV!
This comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123173 &cid=10350537 replies you.
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
Divide the Mass of the object by the distance it will pass earth. If > than ?, post on Slashdot.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
Dan to President: "Well, our object collison budget's about a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg'n your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
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Let's do the math on burning the asteroid up in the atmosphere. Assume you have a 3-mile diameter asteroid going at 50,000mph. That's 5.7e10 m^3 of rock; assuming 5 tons/m^3, mass = 2.9e14 kg. Energy = 0.5mv^2 = 7.2e22 joules.
Assume a blob of gravel of this mass hits one side of the earth evenly distributed over an entire hemisphere over a 1 minute time span. That deposits the energy over 2.6e14 m^2 surface area in 60 seconds, for a total power flux of 4.6 megawatts per square meter of the entire earth; about 4000X the brightness of the sun for 1 minute. Even if the burnup occurs high in the atmosphere, the power influx at the surface would not diminish because the radiation is coming from the whole sky, not from a point source.
Bottom line, everything would fry.
- Name the styles of device which can withstand impact into a target at even ICBM velocities and still detonate correctly. Can't list even one? Want to bet civilization on it working? Me either.
- If you use a stand-off weapon you can apply a shove (by vaporizing a layer off the asteroid surface and expanding it into space) on any side, even a quartering part of the back side. This lets you apply a shove in the direction optimal for making the rock miss the Earth, or crash into something else (like the Moon, if you're lucky enough to have exactly the right configuration).
The real problem is that we do not have the ready launch vehicles and nuclear devices to perform such a trajectory change on short notice. This is the thing I fear the most: our search programs turn up a dangerous rock on an impact orbit in ~6 months, and there is nothing we can do to fix the problem in time.Sustainability and energy independence essay
- Both solar and thermal radiation exert pressure.
- The incoming solar radiation pushes away from the Sun, but the thermal re-radiation from the asteroid pushes away from the hottest parts.
- Asteroids rotate, so the thermal-radiation pressure is not directly away from the Sun but away from the "afternoon" part. The lower the albedo (darker) and the greater the thermal conductivity (lag between peak insolation and peak temperature), the greater the difference between the direction to the Sun and the thrust vector.
By painting the asteroid whiter (or, in theory, darker) you change the amount of heat absorbed and thus the ratio between the thrust from the reflected light (tracks exactly with incoming light) and the thrust from the radiated heat. Given enough time this will let you change the orbit of the rock enough to miss (or possibly hit) what you want it to. This works best with smaller bodies and long (very long) lead times.Sustainability and energy independence essay
No, it's not going to happen in your lifetime.
Replace with:
It's not likely to happen in your lifetime.
emt 377 emt 4
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The choices
A) smashed: solid ground absorbes energy
B) broiled: atmosphere absorbs energy
I definitely take choice B. While the hit on the solid ground will certainly have direct effect on all of us, it's not necessariliy the same with slight heating of the stratosphere (where it's freezing cold, anyway: like -50 degrees or so). We will most probably feel it somehow down here in the troposphere, and we won't like it probably (even worse weather etc.), but it won't kill us instantly as in choice A.
ICBMs typically reach velocities of about 15,000 MPH for their sub-orbital trajectories. Getting into orbit requires about 18,000 MPH, and getting away from Earth to intercept a ways out (days) would require an escape trajectory and 25,000 MPH or more of delta-V. You are not going to get this from an ICBM without very heavy modifications... and that's without the new guidance system. Not trivial.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I clicked the link because I saw "Miss Earth" in the headline and assumed it had something to do with young women wearing bikinis.
Tunguska.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Because a billion tons of gravel travelling at 25,000 miles per hour is just as deadly as a billion ton chunk of rock travelling at 25,000 miles per hour. It's not the rock itself that's the problem. It's the kinetic energy from the object's mass that's the problem. Gravel - rock - it's all the same at 25,000 miles per hour...
Let's try a simple mental experiment. Imagine two guns. One is loaded with a standard lead bullet. The other is loaded with lead dust, with exactly the same mass as that of the bullet. Or let's even make it twice the same mass. Which of the guns you'd rather have firing at you?
i am so sorry for this post
Besides, you probably want to get your shielding material sooner rather than later, and not wait for the approach of a dangerous rock to set your schedule.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you blow up an asteroid of some arbitrary tonnage, say, a nice round billion tons, the planet is STILL fucked. Why?
Simple, and I repeat, a billion tons of gravel is still a billion tons of rock. Sure: there is more surface area and greater heating, BUT - all you have done is taken a catastrophic impact event of a billion tons of rock hitting several quintillion tons of rock (earth) into a billion tons of rock hitting a few million tons of air. At 25,000 mph, the kinetic energy of a billion tons of gravel will get converted directly into heat. So instead of a giant pinpoint nuke going off, it would turn a larger area of the planet into something like a broiler set on HIGH, and this heat event would last quite a long time, as anything that can burn will burn (explosively). Net effect: we all die.
Also: hitting it with a nuke ASSUMES it will *ALL* be reduced to gravel, and this isn't necessarily true. Many asteroids aren't that well put together, and there is a greater chance that by setting off a nuke on an asteroid, instead of a billion ton rock hitting in one spot, you could as easily end up with, say, four 200 million ton rocks all plowing into roughly the same little patch on earth AND 200 million tons of sand, gravel, frozen gasses, and other crap to turn the place into the solar system's biggest hibachi.
I can assure you what I speak is true - IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist) but I have friends who are, and they all tell me the exact same thing:
blowing it up only works in (bad) hollywood movies.
You can't live outside the law of the conservation of mass and energy. A billion (or more) tons of rock is still a billion tons of rock, and when it's travelling at 25,000 miles per hour, it'll blow through 100 miles of atmosphere in about (but not a lot more) than a quarter of a second. BOOM. Game Over.
So, to re-iterate for the jillionth time:
BLOWING UP AN ASTEROID REALLY DOESN'T WORK. PERIOD. REALLY.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We do have some meteorites which are known to have come from the moon, so it's proven that stuff kicked off of there can wind up here. It's also pretty obvious that the pieces that wind up here are nowhere near as big as what smacked the moon in the first place.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
>>
"National Geographic News reports in this story that a giant, peanut shaped asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will pass within 1 million miles of Earth on Weds, the 29th
>>
Gee.... I was expecting to be informed of a direct hit! That way I would be prepared for the chaos down town, the complete armageddon as the result of people running amok in cheer panic.
Just deploy the ship from Atari's Asteroids game. It can shoot the asteroid into two 1.5 mile long asteroids and deflect them in the other direction.
You're still wrong, because of the masses, velocities and time involved, and I've discussed that elsewhere.
Your simple mental experiment is rong as it is simple minded. Now, to scale your experiment, take the bullet travelling directly down at your head, but instead of going through 100 miles of air (and most of that is in the last 10 miles) the bullet is coming at you at bullet speed, 2000 mph, instead of 25,000 mph, and it's only going through 600 feet of air instead of 100 miles, and most of it is very thin except for the last few feet which are normal pressure. So, you have a few ounces of lead in a bullet going right at your head at 2000mph or a few ounces of lead powder or buckshot heading at your head at 2000 mph. Which would you rather deal with? Especially considering that neither the bullet or grit has much atmosphere to contend with until the very last? See?
You're still DEAD.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Upon further consideration, I've come to the conclusion that if an asteroid that big did collide with the Earth ... the complete destruction of all life on the planet would be a small price to pay for finally getting rid of Microsoft.
(It's funny. Laugh.)
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Hope they miss!
amen. was just going to write same but you beat me to it.
Though maybe we can sell this story to get a bigger cut for our military for defences agains 'extraterrestrial threats'
(Scene - Press Conference)
Professor Frink: Hoyven Maven! My new program that has been scanning the skies via powerful telescopes has discovered that a gigantic asteroid is on a collision course with the Earth.
Kent Brockman: What exactly do you mean by "gigantic"?
Professor Frink: It appears to be in the region of 3.5592 miles in diameter. It is also shaped like a peanut.
(cut to the Simpson living room, Homer watches TV from the couch)
Homer(drooling): peeeee-nuuuuts.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Furthermore, if the original mass is broken down into small masses, there was a great deal of energy applied, yes? What part of your asumption shows that these remaining small masses have had insufficient momentum imparted to them to miss the atmosphere entirely, and others to only graze? Not only by the original energy input, but by hitting each other as well - a "pool table break" effect, if you will.
More: Huge energy discharges create other effects, such as shock waves (literally walls of very hard air), plasma and so on. Early impactors will create "harder spots" in the atmosphere that will cause later impactors to splash back to some degree, rather than deliver that 1/2 energy component towards the surface. They could hit each other was well.
I will certainly grant you that it wouldn't be a good thing, but it's not nearly as bad as you paint it - because it's not as simple as volume and speed once it's been well nuked.
That was all assuming a front and center blast with an evenly radial component. If we were to nuke it from behind, we're assnecks, of course, so we won't consider that case.
Nuking it from one side or the other hard enough to reduce it to 1000 subchunks will definitely impart considerable sideways momentum. Do it far enough away, and it'll miss the planet. In 1000 chunks, but so what? Or most of them will miss. A far better case than letting it come in unmolested.
So... it turns out that Hollywood, and the SF writers they took the ideas from (it sure wasn't Hollywood who thought this up) was right after all. Tell your astrophysicist pals to look at more of the effects. They'll get a different answer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I guess the sky is going to fall on our heads after all!
Granite weighs only about 2.9 tons a cubic meter. So if the thing has a density similar to granite, the kinetic energy would be reduced from the your original estimate.
Do you want to learn more?
Guesundheit
OK, but I used to incinerate ants and ignite paper in 1 second with a magnifying glass that probably only concentrated a couple of hundred to 1. Even if in the real world my calculation is high by a factor of 100, we still would get roasted.
If you blow it up, 2 things happen that will help.
1. You do blow parts of the asteroid off course.
2. A block of ice melts slower than the same amount of ice in more pieces. So if a giant asteroid goes through the atmosphere it will surely not be affected much. But if millions of smaller ones go through, it will burn up a lot more.
The dust clouds might take years and years to form.
Mark
Gravel at 25,000 miles an hour would burn up in the earth's atmosphere.
A Billion ton chunk of rock has enough shielding/insulation to not burn up. It would cause a crapload more damage.
How about we try an experiment. We put a tonne of sand above my house in a geosyncronous orbit. And we put a rock that weighs a tonne in a geosyncronous orbit above your house. Then we put them both straight down.
You supply the funding, i'll supply the rock.
What about that "drilling" an asteroid movie?
What if instead of drilling, you send one of those bunker type bombs (well, have the bomb go into the asteroid some distance before it explodes... possibly even a few internal explosions to drive the nuke deeper and deeper into the asteroid)---and then explode. Even if it doesn't "explode" the whole asteroid, I can imagine it would violently chip away a huge chunk of it that might push it off course by some distance. Do that a few times, and it might just deflect enough.
Just wondering...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
We don't know that we need to mount a mission yet, but someone could literally look in their telescope tonight and see a comet capable of causing a mass extinction event heading straight for us. It's only smart to have something that we can use, even if it's only a dual-use technology like a throwaway heavy-boost rocket that we can also use for Mars missions and stuff. What's the cost of developing something like that a little sooner and keeping something on hand? What's the cost of the network of telescopes required to find such threats, over and above the considerable scientific return that they'd yield? That's the beauty, most of the things you need to do to defend Earth against space hazards also promote other worthwhile goals.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
There is one high tide when the moon is over head and one when the moon is underfoot.
How is this possible? Well, if they told you what they told me in elementary school, I can understand your confusion.
Remember both the earth and the moon spin around a common center of gravity.
The best way to understand tides is to find or borrow a small child. Hold both her hands and spin in a circle. Her feet get pulled away from you and her hands get pulled toward you.
FYI: We really have four tides in a day. (twice a month the the sun's tides and the moon's tides overlap)
Why don't you just paint it black and that way it'll be too ashamed to live up to it's full potential. {Black people everywhere gigle at the proportion of that joke...then all is still}
Smile.
What you really want to do is tell people about the rock, but tell them it'll just a be a near miss, a million miles or some such. Nothing to worry about.
Or, send out a huge mass mailing:
From: V|agra4U
Subject: News Flash: Asteroid to Hit Earth in 4 Days!
It has been confirmed that a large Asteroid is going to hit the earth in only 4 days! You've always wanted to try it, so ACT NOW AND WE CAN GET V|AGRA TO YOUR HOME WITH TIME TO SPARE!
People will double-take, and think they're being scammed (which would, in fact, be true, but not in the way they think). Then they'd assume future reports of same were just other people being scammed, and they just might go about their normal business...
Even if we could find a way to detonate every nuclear weapon we possess, at the same spot, on a 3 mile diameter asteroid it is not going to turn it into gravel; the asteroid will have it's orbit altered some, and *possibly* would fracture along it's internal fault lines.
The most likely result of such a fracture would be a small number of rocks with diameters ranging from a few tens of meters to hundreds of thousands of meters, and a small amount of gravel. A lot of that depends on what the composition of the asteroid is. If it's carbonaceous - like comets - there would be smaller fragments - if it's a stony or iron composition, it's unlikely we'd be able to fracture it at all, or if we could, then into very large chunks.
The REAL migraine there is that if the result was a lot of big chunks, their orbits would be altered enough that it's possible that they'd touch down at points distributed along the line of the Earth's rotation, thereby distributing the destruction even more widely. Remember, even a large ~ 3-8km-diameter asteroid's impact zone will be somewhat localized - even if it did alter the global climate, the worst effects would stay within one hemisphere. Not so with a time-distributed impact of many semi-large rocks.
Anything along these lines will have to be contemplated and modelled VERY carefully; the best data we could get would be if we had time to land probes on the asteroid in question and get seismic soundings of it's structure, and even then we'd still be playing with a lot of uncertaintities.
We should be pursuing studies and sending probes like this right now, so that if in the future the necessity emerges we at least have a good amount of data on many different rocks to use in our calculations, rather than some hurried-up last minute/year effort. But hell, this is all gibberish to most of those morons who make policy anyway, so what's the point of arguing it anymore in the public venue? Well, we need funding for those probes and studies... and like many other issues that need attention, this one is being ignored this year in favor of arguing over people's fucking war records from thirty years ago, and this in the country that is the world's most technologically capable society.
Sometimes I wonder if humanity as a whole hasn't already drank the koolaid.
slash rant
Sigh. Goddamn I hate election years.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I think the asteroid slammed into the National Geographic webserver. It's toast.
Another good argument for having permanent observation satellites in lunar orbit... it's not like it costs *that* much more to put them there rather than in Earth orbit
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
selling insurance for damage done by Toutatis, expiring Dec 31, 2005
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Luna, at 2160 miles diameter, often passes by the Earth at 238 855 miles!
This is far scarier than some puny 3 mile asteroid!!
You can even SEE this monstrous danger with the naked eye!!!
Run for your lives! Let hedonism reign!
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
Ok, it beg's the question... shelled or unshelled?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The question can be formulated this way: If an asteroid came whizzing close by, what is the probability it would hit the moon?
Well, the earth's diameter is four times the moon's, so the area it presents is sixteen times the moon's. Therefore the probability of hitting the earth is sixteen times that of hitting the moon, and we really should be at least 16 times as worried about earth impacts as moon impacts.
Further, the orbit of the moon is 60 times the size of the earth, so the area it presents is 3600 times the area the earth presents. If an asteroid comes whizzing through, inside the moon's orbit (an unlikely event in itself), its probability of missing is 3600 times it hitting the earth or the moon.
Things pass the earth all the time. You can check them out here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
Or if an asteroid strikes the moon a glancing blow, setting it spinning so we can see the far side ourselves...!!
How much energy would that take, and would a dinosaur-killer-size asteroid impact be enough? The moon has a static "solid tide" of roughly 50 meters, bulging toward and away from the Earth, which maintains the tidal lock. How much of a push would it take to cause a 90-degree libration?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
my mod points back :)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I choose.. B It's an interesting double experiment: B1 nuke a distant object in space B2 observe how the atmosphere absorbs the energy
Agreed, with one nit:
The most likely result of such a fracture would be a small number of rocks with diameters ranging from a few tens of meters to hundreds of thousands of meters
You're not going to get chunks with a diameter of "hundreds of thousands of metres" out of a rock 3 miles in diameter, as it only has a diameter of ~4800m to start with.
Other than that I agree - while landing on an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, planting a couple of nukes and blowing it to Hell makes for good(ish) cinema, the reality would be rather different.
Pushing the thing off course is about all we could do, and right now there's no way we'd see it in time. Hell, there was one a few months ago that we didn't even know about until it had passed by.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're dealing with tens of billions of tons of material; better make them *huge* nukes.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"What if two nukes were sent. One to break the astroid into thousands of pieces and the second to distribute those pieces over a greater amount of area?"
How many nuclear explosion tests have we done that resulted in a 3-mile wide crater? The trinity site left a crater 3 meters deep and 330 meters wide, which would be a shallow hole equivalent to 1/14th of the diameter of such a rock, which would now be missing 0.0165% of its mass.
Of course those are surface blasts, but then it would have to be, wouldn't it?
Fuck that! Send all the nukes we have! It's not like if it fails we still have anything left to do with them...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Assume you have a 3-mile diameter asteroid...
The 3-mile-long (4.8-kilometer-long) peanut-shaped asteroid...
Probably a three mile long cylinder with a 1 mile diameter would be more accurate.
When they say that asteroids/meteors are going to hit Earth they are always wrong - now they say this one is going to miss us??? Run for cover!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
How about a 4.8 km long cylinder with a .8 km radius, for a grand total of 9.65 km^3 of rock, or 9.65e9 m^3, or about 1/6th of your estimate.
I just wanted to take close look.
DOH, major typo LOL. I meant hundreds OR thousands of meters, of course. Not often I do that
Another thought; to even push it off course with any efficiency we'd have to plant the nukes *below* the surface, so a part of the asteroid is kicked away - action/reaction. Detonating a nuke on or above the surface would give the rock some small kick from the hard particle front, but not much
Cheers
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Hmm, no, it's named after the gallic/celtic totemic deity Toutatis, known as "the Father of the Tribe", the God of War, and protector of the celt people.
Many Apollo objects (=Earth-crossing) are named after gallic deities.
Old mate, you said one thing, then when it was argued, you used some physics calculator to argue a different thing. Maybe you should consider a carreer in politics.
you originally said:
So i said:
And then you give me a crapload of calculations for
Holy crap you're a tripper. All I'm saying is that one big rock would cause more damage than gravel. And, just like a politician, you've argued some different point.
In the end you try and get back to some sort of resemblance of a point - good on you. Yeah the kenetic energy would be converted to heat. No it wouldn't be a nice thing. But i'm not arguing if it would be a nice thing of not. I'm just saying that one chunk of rock would cause more damage than the same mass of gravel.
If you want some physics involved, Take one of the most pure physics laws we know. Newtons law. Force = Mass x Acceleration. If the mass of the object is less, then the force is less if the acceleration remains constant. I don't need pages to show you that gravel has less force than a big rock.
Now can you quit with your whining - you're giving nerds a bad name.
I've never understood how phase locking, resonance, whatever you call it works.
In a nutshell, gravity causes tides, which create friction, which slows relative rotation until the tidal lock is achieved. The ocean tides on Earth caused by the moon have a net frictional effect of slowing down Earth's rotation relative to the moon. This applies to any non-rigid parts, such as a molten core. The Moon was probably tidally locked while it retained a molten core, but was then eventually "frozen" into a permanent static tidal bulge.
The moon currently resists rotation because the tidal forces still "stretch" it toward and away from Earth, and rotating it would be akin to a dancer pulling in her arms; i.e. it takes energy, which is gradually dissipated by friction because the moon is not absolutely rigid. (Think mini-moonquakes.) True, if the moon were perfectly spherical it would not be tidally locked, but even a small asymmetry will amplify itself over time and create a lock.
Hope this clarifies.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Besides, if you spray the paint on in a fly-by (or even an impact) maneuver, you'll get that same initial delta-V anyway. It's the addition of the paint that is "the gift that keeps on giving".
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Assume a blob of gravel of this mass hits one side of the earth evenly distributed over an entire hemisphere
Meteor shower?
+++ATHZ 99:5:80