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Asteroid Flies Under the Radar, Literally
mrn121 writes "Space.com is reporting that a 16-foot wide asteriod has passed the Earth in a phenomenally close call. The Asteroid, named 2004 YD5, passed just below the 22,300 mile range where geostationary satellites sit. What makes the incident most interesting is that the asteriod was not seen until after it passed the Earth, due to the well-known Cosmic Blind Spot caused by the Sun."
The asteroids that are large enough to do damage can be seen far away enough that the cosmic blind spot is irrelevant. The article mentions a 2.9 mile wide asteroid (which would quickly wipe out all life on the planet if it hit) which scientists have known about for years. It won't come anywhere close.
At the moment, we have no defense against a planet-killing asteroid, but the European Space Agency is studying the issue, and NASA's Deep Impact project is also working on it.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
While that does kind of suck that we had no idea of it before it passed "close" by, one has to ask, does it matter if we see it coming or not?
If an asteroid does head for us, will it matter if we see it coming or not? Or will the grandiose idea presented in "Armageddon" be employed (despite being cool as hell.)
Personally, i'd rather be blindsided by a sixteen-wheeler, than sit by and see it head towards me for hours/days/weeks.
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Heck, I've seen BOULDERS bigger than that (if you ever visit Central Oregon, the High Desert Museum has one about that size sitting on top of a car- it's pumice obviously). That ain't no asteroid, that's a meteor.
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I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
2002 is different from 2004, I feel bad for your HS Math teacher.
Correct, a nuke detonated against an asteroid could conceivably break it up or change its course. It's just a shame that we don't have a delivery system with the range, speed, or accuracy needed to actually HIT an incoming asteroid.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Ok, of ALL the asteroids to talk about, space.com reports on a 16 ft rock that poses no threat at all to life on this rock?
Why don't we get a listing of every meteor that comes down? How big are the meteorites that actually hit the ground normally if this would have gone pow way up in the sky?
I think that more money shold be spent on finding asteroids that could kill us and ways to prevent that, but reporting on near misses with grains of dust comparative to Earth seems to be counter productive.
I recall seeing a video that someone took at a high school football game one time and they saw a big meteor coming down and got a good view of it. I do believe it was larger then 16 ft.
Is it just me, or does it seem like we have one of these each month.
Are they becoming more frequent, or is it that we can monitor them more effectively now.
I should have been more specific. We can predict where and when it would come down but the course alterations due to its entering the gravity well would probably prevent the exact point of impact from being determined until the weeks, and possibly even days, before impact. Prior to that you're not going to get any more accurate that "it'll come down somewhere in north or south America, the Atlantic, or the Pacific", or possibly "Europe, western Asia, or Africa".
So yeah, the people on the side of the planet that it was coming down on would know that their hemisphere was about to be hit, but no more than that. And honestly...what good would that information do? Even if we could narrow the impact site down to a continent sized area like North America, do you really think we could evacuate the entire United States, Canada, and Mexico in that period of time? Where would those 400 million people go?
Nope, our technology simply isn't advanced enough to allow us to deflect, or even evacuate before impact, if a truly siseable asteroid ever stuck the Earth.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
So... when you say 'literally', you mean 'metaphorically' right? As in not literally under a radar... *sigh*
I would think that even the least socially-gifted geek would have no trouble finding someone to screw if the world was going to end tomorrow.
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Have you thought, perhaps, that the Earth may well end up devestated tomorrow anyway? There could be war, pestilence, famine... just think what would happen if there were a limited nuclear war in the Middle East, for instance: No fuel for trucks, no trucks to drive groceries to the grocery store, things would get out of hand quickly.
Maybe it's better to go ahead and spend time with your loved ones and with important projects now than wait for the world to end first.
What's the point? Is the skipper going to change course? Are we going to somehow vaporize it?
Who cares how people feel about it. I can see how tracking near-Earth objects might be interesting from a scientific perspective. However, I don't see the point in using a massive amount of resources in doing so just in an attempt to provide piece-of-mind.
I am the type of person that, in the case of the annihilation of the human race, believes that ignorance is bliss. If a scientist discovers that we will all face certain death in the next 24 hours, I don't want to know about it. If nuclear war broke out, I'd want to be one of the first to fall.
I, for one, would much rather just go about my ordinary, self-absorbed life and sleep peacefully at night.
I ask again, what's the point?
We don't have to spot the 16 footers.
--- Ban humanity.
It flew under the weather radar satellites - LITERALLY. There.
If there WAS an asteroid hurtling towards us and we had significant warning, I'm sure we could throw something together. If we don't have that ability today, the information we gather now could be useful in the future if such an event occurs.
Several hours? How long do you think it takes a rock to fall through the atmosphere? Less than a minute or so. And, unless all the fragments go through the exact same spot one after the other, the energy will disperse. The reason you have to worry about the impact is that the energy is transferred to something solid (At those speeds water can be considered solid because it can't move out of the way fast enough.) and turns into shock waves.
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I think when it comes to this kind of crap, we have to be "in it for the species". Whether we're talking about a city of 100,000 or a city of 10,000,000, it's still just a drop in the bucket of 8-10 billion.
If we could come up with a way to stop these things, how often would we NEED to, and how much would it cost?
We need to pick and choose where we spend our money. I'm all for spending much, much more on scientific endeavors, but I'd rather spend the LIMITED amount of money we have on scientific endeavors that will accomplish something.
Or maybe we could save more people (over the same time it takes to have one of these things hit a "city") by simply finding a way to stop wars?
That'd be a worthwhile cause in my book. Inventing a vaporous 21st century SDI system is not...
We have a Greenhouse effect that is threatening us NOW, more slowly than a hurtling asteroid - so we can deal with it - but just as inevitably. Instead of doing something about it, we're denying it and making it worse. What makes you think an asteroid won't be "just a theory" to the people too entrenched in feeding at the status quo trough to raise their snouts?
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Newton's law of gravitation is much simpler than the incredibly chaotic system that makes up our climate. Once such an asteroid is discovered and the details published, anybody with a year or two of university-level math and physics will be able to verify its path.
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