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2004 MN4, Even Higher Probability
phreakuencies writes "Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to its 'impact risk' section at NASA. The asteroid started as having a 1/233 probability of hitting earth. Later it raised to 1/63. Daily computations made on 25 Dec raised its chances up to 1/45. Optimists can now say it has a 97.8% probability of missing earth." And Veteran writes " NeoDys offers the 'Orbfit' software package (source code released under the GPL) which can be used to get a pre-release view of the situation with Asteroid 2004MN4."
The way I see it, we've got about 24 years to party before the world ends. Have another glögg!
Seriously, if it hits 5 or greater on the scale, then we'll have reason to really worry. In the meantime, it's sufficient to just watch and see what happens. As phreakuencies pointed out, right now there's a 97.8% chance of absolutely nothing happening.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Which will come first, 2004 MN4 asteroid, or
Duke Nukem Forever?
At first I thought it says " it has a 97.8% probability of hitting earth"
Good thing i read it over again.
Just to reassure you
http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact/
The impact comes out as somewhere between 450MT and 1.6GT, depending on speed and composition
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
'nuff said
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
If this trend continues, expect an impact in another 4629 hours, or about 193 days!
It's going to be one hot summer...
;-)
You know in all those movies where some guy, sometimes just an amateur scientist, sees something in his telescope/seismograph/thermometer/disease-modeling -software that all the high-up professionals miss, and rushes in to warn the government?
That doesn't happen.
So kick back and relax in the knowledge that, even if a global catastrophe is imminent, there's fuck-all you can do about it, except make yourself a quick drink.
The coolest voice ever.
I don't see a conspiracy here, and do think we will be missed, but given how much they hyped previous possible events with less statistical support it is curious they aren't doing follow ups. Could just be that it's Christmas, and things in the science departments are on autopilot.
If this thing stays greater than 1/100 by Monday, expect the papers and television to start picking up on it again. There was a close encounter today with 2004-vw14 (something like 5 lunar orbit distance), and the kooks where on the net prophesizing doom (even though it wasn't all that big a rock). It may take some years to really get a bead on where this thing is going, likely going up and down in probability.
Expect no fewer than a dozen Death-Cults if it stays in double-digit probabilities. Do the Darwin Awards cover Death-Cults?
Letter To Iran
Am I just sick, or do other people find the possibility of this thing hitting to be pretty damn exciting? The chaos, the devestation, the panic, the collapse of all social systems... jeez, that would honestly be one of the coolest (And last) things to ever happen in most of our lives. The timeframe is nice too... many of us that are currently in our late 20's, early 30's will be wiped out before things start going really downhill for us (physically), but we'll have enough time to get a decent bit of fun stuff done too. Bring it on!
I don't respond to AC's.
It's important to note that if the chances of impact are 1 in 45, then the chances that future observations will exclude the possibility impact are 44 in 45.
The two events "asteroid hits us" and "we can never exclude the possibility of it hitting us" are equivalent: the first happens if and only if the second happens. Therefore the two events have the same probability.
So the "don't worry" part of the above sentence is pointless: the second half sentence is a mere reformulation of the first; there is no reassuring "extremely high" probability that future observations will correct the number downward.
That's not necessarily true. It depends on the characteristics of the error.
If the errors are Gaussian, if the nominal trajectory (i.e. "it misses the Earth by X+/-Y km") is accurate, but imprecise (that is, X is correct, but Y is large compared to X) then the probability of impact will decrease as the precision is improved (i.e. as Y decreases) because the "Earth impact" possibility moves farther out on the fringes of the observation, and the area doesn't shrink fast enough to compensate for this.
Of course, if the errors are flat (all solutions are equally likely - actually, if the PSF falls off slower than the area shrinks) then you're correct. I'm pretty sure that they're Gaussian, or approximately Gaussian, though. So the only way the probability could be increasing is if the nominal trajectory's impact parameter is decreasing - that is, closer impact.
From the last post about this, I went and read up on the whole thing. I went to the beautiful CGI script where you input asteroid size and velocity and all that, and assumed I was 100km from the impact.
I had to up the asteroid size to 1300 metres and a velocity of 14kps of dense rock colliding with porous rock before I could interpret the results as something that would suck for me (2nd degree burns on my body from the fireball).
There would be no major earth effects of such an asteroid hitting Earth, so it said.
Compare these stats against our current fearsome asteroid.
In one thread I saw someone refer to this as possibly a human-extinction event. I have a hard time believing that once I actually bother to go check this out. It'd sure suck for everyone within 100km of the impact site but for everyone else, I guess we'd have about the same effects as a major earthquake to deal with.
fifth sigma, inc.
Yeah, Han and the gang are going to trick Darth into moving the Deathstar right into the path of it. Then the DoD will claim it to be a Two for One event.
Pfft. Before that can ever happen, I think we all know that the Stargate team would be able to send the asteroid into hyperspace for just a few seconds, coming out on the other side of the planet (and thus missing it).
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
Imagine how much technology boost all the related stuff will receive. If the Moon shot (the pure publicity stunt) generated so much progress, imagine this.
By the time we will know it is going to miss by 500km, we will already have cheap reliable interplanet travel and will be able to melt/mine/whatever the asteroids. Cool.
...we're looking at very little of the sky *at one time*. I don't think it takes much amateur equipment to spot something which would be missed by "normal" study, which usually involved spendning forever looking at one tiny fixed part of the sky to gather enough light/EM to make a clearer picture than the last one (i.e. mapping space).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...but I sort of hope it is found to have a much, much higher likelyhood of hitting earth, so much so that's it's almost certain to occur.
Why? Simply because it would post such a great challenge for humankind. It could well bring much greater cooperation between countries, cooperation of a level presently unheard of.
Certainly, I'm not hoping it actually strikes earth, merely that people work together in order to stop it.
Just be glad that Bush won't be the president at the time. If it did hit, in US soil no less, then he'd start pouring billions per month into NASA for the development of spacecraft to fight the alien 'terrorists' who threw that asteroid at America.
Do powerful countries will prefer to do nothing to avert making a mistake that could possibly send the asteroid on their head?
What could possibly do a small country in africa if nobody wants to help them?
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
There are numbers besides the Torino scale. The press doesn't use them because they're not as easy to explain. A value of 4 on the Torino scale explicitly means that the public should not be at all concerned or even really aware of the possible impact. It is meant to attract the attention of other astronomers so that more measurements can be done.
As far as a measure of progress, here's a simple one. At 100% progress the probability of impact is either 100% or 0%. Intermediate progress is the width of the window in which the impact might occur. If this window narrows to such a point that it does not include the earth, you get a 0% probability. If the earth is bigger than the entire window, you get a 100% probability. Anything else means there is more work to be done. The rate at which the window narrows will depend on the orbit of the asteroid, but that would give you a rough idea of when you'd be 100% sure.
If you are really curious, the locations and time of every observation that contributes to this is available online. It's interesting to note that more observations were done today than any other day. This is a direct result of the object being identified as an object of interest on the Torino scale.