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.

Comments

Wow, the biggest this century!!!

[sgant]

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...

Re:Wow, the biggest this century!!!

[pbranes]

Actually, asteroids coming near the earth are pretty common. Check out the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_impacts

However, our current programsto track asteroids that might hit the earth is extremely limited.

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

So close to not having to pay next months rent

what if...?

[rokzy]

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.

Re:what if...?

[PhrostyMcByte]

500 years? let the apes deal with it.

Re:what if...?

[gl4ss]

we would regard it as "none of our problem", but the technology would continue to evolve.

in couple of generations people would start making up some plans to escape from the disaster.

By toutatis...

[ch3]

... seems the sky missed us this time! ;)

Peanut-shaped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, would like to welcome our new oven-roasted overlords...

Here's the proof. Free 27" flatscreen TV.

Not especially close

[yellowstone]

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.

seems to be an awful lot of 'close calls'

[Depris]

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?

Re:seems to be an awful lot of 'close calls'

[Tony Hoyle]

Not a lot really. We don't really have the technology.

We wouldn't get months probably. Days, perhaps. If we're really unlucky, hours.

That would make one hell of a slashdot headline while it lasted, though.

Re:seems to be an awful lot of 'close calls'

[johannesg]

Yeah, 2 days after it strikes slashdot will read: Asteroid going to strike earth.

And again another two days later, and yet again after a week. Anyone who survived the impact will be killed by heart failure.

Think of the polls!

"After the impact, I will be..."

[ ] Dead.

[ ] Surviving.

[ ] Cowboy Neal will deflect the asteroid.

"Having only hours to live, I will..."

[ ] Find a beautiful woman and shag her until the earth shakes!

[ ] Post some more on slashdot.

[ ] Read a good book I never had time for before.

[ ] Make sure my backups are in order.

[ ] Position my webcame outside so people on other continents can see it come and watch me die.

[ ] Set up that webcam, find Cowboy Neal, shag him until the earth shakes, then post about it on slashdot, and still have the satisfiction that noone will survive to talk about it.

[ ] Same as above, but then find out the asteroid thing was a hoax.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[AlphaJoe]

Didn't you see Armageddon? You can't do that...we must send Bruce Willis to mine holes and gently plant the explosives. Geez...

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[Tony Hoyle]

Method 1 is novel, but probably wouldn't produce enough of a course change to matter... we'd still die (remember we're unlikely to spot an asteroid until it's way too a late for minor course changes to make a difference).

Method 2 plain wouldn't work. Asteroids aren't solid objects so they can absorb a lot of shock, plus if you managed to break it up all the little bits would have the same total velocity as the original asteroid... death by a thousand cuts.

Learn all about Near-Earth Objects

[CompSurfer]

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.

Idea is not to obliterate the asteroid.

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea is not to obliterate the asteroid. The idea is to use the explosive force of the hydrogen bomb to slightly nudge the asteroid. A slight nudge far away from earth would change the asteroid's path sufficiently so that the object avoids earth.

That is the meaning of the grandparent post.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise surely that 1000 small asteroids is a lot better than 1 large asteroid, right? The effect of 1000 small chunks would be greatly reduced due to them burning up faster while descending through the atmosphere. Same total velocity my ass, i'm all up for air resistance.

That's too bad...

[theraccoon]

Guess that means I still gotta go to work on Monday.

sigh.

Asteroid, or volcano? Which is it?

[Judg3]

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.

Re:Asteroid, or volcano? Which is it?

[jeremyp]

The "Earth's biggest mass extinction" refers not to the dinosaurs being wiped out but the one at the end of the Permian more than 250 million years ago.

FU162

[djtripp]

That is quite the appropriate letter sequence for an asteroid that comes close to earth.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[Waffle Iron]

You do realise surely that 1000 small asteroids is a lot better than 1 large asteroid, right? The effect of 1000 small chunks would be greatly reduced due to them burning up faster while descending through the atmosphere.

1000 pieces of a 3-mile asteroid are each 0.3 miles (0.5km) in diameter. The atmosphere is barely going to singe a rock of that size before it impacts.

Even if were blown to tiny pieces, that wouldn't help. Scientific American had a recent article that hypothesized that one of the worst parts of a big impact is the rebound of billions of tiny fragments into space, which then rain down all over the globe. Each one burns up individually, but the overall effect heats the entire atmosphere to hundreds of degrees, incinerating just about everything on the planet.

Sliced big or small, that much mass coming in from outer space would be a major problem.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety - half right

[Ralph Spoilsport]

painting it white, with enough lead time would indeed work. Blowing it up, would not.

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

Humans are not dinosaurs

[mantera]

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.

Re:Humans are not dinosaurs

[Decaff]

We're fragile beings that need a very specific envrionment to survive

Absolutely not. One of the reasons our species is so successful is our ability to deal with a very wide range of environments, from the hottest deserts to the artic circle.

Most likely aquatic life will be the survivors.

This is probably true. It seems that the main period of death after the 'dinosaur-killer' impact was a few hours after impact. The survivors were almost all aquatic creatures and burrowers. And insects, of course - they seem to survive just about anything.

Astronomers would learn a lot if it hit the moon

[billstewart]

If something that big hit the Earth, it would release a huge amount of debris into the atmosphere, affecting solar energy absorbtion/reflection, maybe doing a nuclear-winter-style cooling, affecting clouds, possibly causing chemical-related problems depending on what it threw around, making a big atmospheric shock wave that would devaste everything in a huge radius around it, cause lots of fires, and cause a big earthquake which might trigger more quakes, etc.,

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.

Re:Painting Your Way to Safety

[Ikester8]

...all the little bits would have the same total velocity as the original asteroid

I dunno. My experience with asteroids is that the smaller the chunks, the faster they travel. Same with the flying saucers.

Moon?

[OgGreeb]

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.)

I hope it's not just me...

[bloxnet]

...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!!!!"

What painting does

[Engineer-Poet]

There are a few matters of physics that you have to know for this to make sense:

1. Both solar and thermal radiation exert pressure.
2. The incoming solar radiation pushes away from the Sun, but the thermal re-radiation from the asteroid pushes away from the hottest parts.
3. 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.

BLOWING UP AN ASTEROID DOESN'T WORK

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I posted this before, I'll post it again - it seems no one is listening.

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

Define "problem"

[Engineer-Poet]

The chunks of ejecta from a lunar impact will almost certainly be much smaller than the original body, and very few of them would actually hit Earth. The ones which did might well be spread out over time, also. Faced with a choice between braving a 3-mile asteroid impact on Earth and the debris coming to Earth from impact of the same on the moon, I'll let it hit the moon.

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.

Definitely worth it

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.)

Re:Sorry Ralphyboy, but you're a tripper!

[Ralph Spoilsport]

No newphobia, you're just not paying attention to basic physics. Law of conservation of Energy and Mass.

Take a one cubic mile mass of solid granite. 5280 x 5280 x 5280 (cubic mile) x 170 lbs (one cubic foot of granite) and you get:

25,023,651,840,000 pounds, or

12,511,825,920 tons

this is an object MUCH SMALLER than the asteroid in question. In fact, I would say it is 1/4 the size of the obect in question, but I doubt the asteroid Toutanis is made completely of granite. It's probably part rock, iron, and ice like most of these things, and so it's mass (my pure out of my ass guess) is probably only 2 - 3 times that a 1 cubic mile of granite. so let's be generous to the ice-side and say 2.5 times. that would be:

31,279,564,800 TONS.

THIRTY ONE BILLION TONS.

OK....

And it's what?: 2.7 miles x 1.3 miles (roughly). Which means it is probably tumbling through space and is (obviously) not spherical. so you blow it up in the middle and you get TWO big chunks of say 15 billion tons each and a billion or so tons of gravel and million ton objects.

So, what say we put THAT in a trajectory through space in such a way that it directly impact over your head. Better yet: I'll even give you some room: I'll put you 500 miles away.

And THIS is what would happen, and this is assuming it's made out of average loose crap and I averaged it to a 2 mile object:

(per this site: asteroid impact effects calculator

Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 805.00 km = 499.90 miles
Projectile Diameter: 3218.68 m = 10557.27 ft = 2.00 miles
Projectile Density: 1500 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 20.00 km/s = 12.42 miles/s
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock

Energy: Energy before atmospheric entry: 5.24 x 1021
Joules = 1.25 x 106 MegaTons TNT. The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 5.4 x 10^6years

Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 75100 meters = 246000 ft. The projectile reaches the ground in a broken condition. The mass of projectile strikes the surface at velocity 19.9 km/s = 12.4 miles/s. The impact energy is 5.19 x 1021 Joules = 1.24 x 106MegaTons. The broken projectile fragments strike the ground in an ellipse of dimension 3.32 km by 3.32 km

Transient Crater Diameter: 25.2 km = 15.6 miles. Transient Crater Depth: 8.89 km = 5.52 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 38.5 km = 23.9 miles. Final Crater Depth: 0.888 km = 0.551 miles

The crater formed is a complex crater.

The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 46.2 km3 = 11.1 miles. Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 93 meters = 305 feet

Seismic Effects: The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 161 seconds.Richter Scale Magnitude: 8.7.Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 805 km:
III. Felt quite noticeably by persons indoors, especially on upper floors of buildings. Many people do not recognize it as an earthquake. Standing motor cars may rock slightly. Vibrations similar to the passing of a truck.

IV. Felt indoors by many, outdoors by few during the day. At night, some awakened. Dishes, windows, doors disturbed; walls make cracking sound. Sensation like heavy truck striking building. Standing motor cars rocked noticeably.

Ejecta:

The ejecta will arrive approximately 436 seconds after the impact. At your position the ejecta arrives in scattered fragments
Average Ejecta Thickness: 7.99 mm = 0.315 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 1.01 mm = 0.0396 inches

Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive at approximately 2440 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 13600 Pa = 0.136 bars = 1.93 psi
Max wind velocity: 30.3 m/s = 67.9 mph
Sound Intensity: 83 dB (