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2004 MN4 Asteroid Odds Inching Up Again
bfwebster writes "The latest update from NASA now gives 2004 MN4 a 1-in-37 chance (probability of 2.7%) of hitting Earth on April 13, 2029. That's a bump up from the 1-in-46 (2.2%) odds given this weekend and almost a 10x increase in probability from the original 1-in-300 odds announced late last week. Interesting times, indeed."
Ladies and gentlemen, may i present the new Slashdot soap opera: Asteroid 2004 MN4!!! That's right -- we have ourselves a new SCO! Watch out, for soon, it'll be demanding $699 license fees from all of you!
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Or, if you prefer, they are now at 1 in 1,000,000.
This edition of Fun With URLs has been brought to you courtesy of an overly trusting NASA webmaster.
Will Bruce Willis even by alive by then?
Play Command HQ online
I are not under stand what you is try ing to said hear.
One and a half gigatons. Nice. Even if it landed in an ocean, it would still make quite a splash.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Would this be Friday the 13th?
24 more years to try and get laid.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
When can we start the looting?
Sure enough, April 13, 2029 is a Friday.
Maybe that old superstition was a premonition instead...
Have you read my blog lately?
this is more likely to kill you than ANY OTHER death due to injury in your lifetime!
Odds of Death Due to Injury, National Safety Council
A tinfoil hat isn't gunna stand a chance against this thing.
I would start to worried if astronomers suddenly started to buy a lot of Boeing and Lockheed stock.
How long does it have to be observed before we know whether it will hit or not? Will a year of observation give us certainty? The Torino scale is a bit strange, given the way that it combines chance of impact, time until impact, and severity of impact. I would think that a three dimensional scale would be more useful.
Lasers Controlled Games!
(Uh, 1 in 7, better than the odds of it hitting Earth.)
Google news's collation of the worldwide media's coverage of this story seams to show that the mainstream serious media is ignoring this story.
UK Laptops
If it misses the first time, it has 40 more chances to hit. The good news is that the other chances are substantially less than the first.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Ok, we now know the probability of the object hitting the earth. What is the possibility of the object hitting the moon?
What impact will the earth have if the object hits the moon?
I can only wonder how high that percentage has to go before we start making plans on how to avoid the posible impact.
Sadly, in the end it will all come down to politics. The president (any president of any country with enough power to do something about this) will want to have certainty before taking the risk of being labeled the greatest hero or the greatest fool in history. And I am not even taking international politics into account.
I guess that it all depends on how high we value life itself.
Cheers,
Adolfo
1 in 37? Who'd be dumb enough to worry with odds like that?! Now excuse me, I need to go buy a lottery ticket for this week.
Keep Austin Weird!
Uh oh. We slashdotted nasa.
I think that might be a federal crime!
due to your EXCELLENT math skills.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It will be intereresting to see what happens on the political front, if it is eventually determined that this thing will hit earth.
At 300m across, it is small enough to be nuked out of harm's way. And fortunately, we still have a lot of time on our side to plan and fly a mission to blast it to rubble, or at least into a different trajectory. But this would mean at least temporarily revoking some treaties regarding nuclear detonations in space. And how will the bill be divided up? What happens if is eventually determined that this thing will land in central Asia or Africa - will unaffected countries still be willing to pick up the tab?
Looks like we will need to develop some sort of (funded) international contingency plan to deal with dangers from space, even if it is eventually determined this particular rock will miss us.
My rights don't need management.
People, please stop slashdotting Nasa. It makes them look even worse. Deadly asteroids, THEN server explosions ?
From article summary: Interesting times, indeed.
"May you live in interesting times"! Aha! I get it! It's a clever ancient Chinese proverb with a double-meaning!
Wait - no it isn't.
Brought to you by the Slashdot FactCheck 2004 coalition - preventing inaccuracy before it starts!
but it does raise the issue of needing more money put into research and defense in case an asteriod is found
Does anyone get the idea that someone could possibly be playing with the numbers to get funding for someone's pet project? I put a certain level of trust in NASA and I don't think the current data is necessarily inaccurate, but the thought did cross my mind. What do Slashdotters think?
What is your penile percentile?
I think this one is about 1000 feet across, not the 16 foot one mentioned the other day
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No we don't have to worry about systems with time_t defined as a 32bit signed int rolling over in 2038.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
If you ever get a chance to bet on an asteroid wiping out humanity, make sure you bet that it won't; otherwise even if you win you can't collect.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
So, that's a 97.29% chance that you'll still have to file your taxes two days later.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And I thought the last crash of '29 was depressing.
-Peter
Yeah, I did notice the 9.4.
;-)
I also noticed the e-7.
I'm pretty sure this isn't the one. This is 1,300 feet, not 16.
And the server's name is NEO standing for Near Earth Object.
I think I'm going to claim exempt for 2028.. because their is a 1 and 37 chance that I won't have to pay up.
Obama = Socialism.
I hope it's after noon - I have an important 10 o'clock meeting that morning.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
How long do we have to wait for this
Hi
I am Prince Okabaoakauu of of the microbial strain found on Asteroid Mn4. We control the motion of our asteroid and can divert it safely if the earthlings wish so. However we are not sure if the earthlings(a.k.a. you) want a collision or not. Hence to help us decide , please forward this mail to 12 people within 1 hour of receiving the mail if you do not want a collision. You will also get a free mobile phone and 2 Ipods. If you do NOT immediately forward this email we will assume that you want the collision.
Thanks
I JUST RECVD THIS MAIL, PLS FWD IT TO ALL UR FRIENDS
That there's not a Beowulf cluster of these things on the way.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I ran it through the calculator for a 400 meter asteroid (from the article) made of dense rock (assumed) at 17 km/s and 45 degree impact (suggested by the calculator). I also dropped it in 1000 m of water, as it has a 75% chance of landing in the oceans.
Results
- Impact Energy: 1.23 x 10^19 Joules
- Crater Formed in Seafloor: 2.46 km diameter
- Earthquake: 6.0 on Richter Scale
- Radiant Flux at 100 km: 7.68 times that of sun
Numbers should, of course, be taken with a grain of saltJust because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth. Suppose that the asteroid were going to come close to Earth without hitting it. At first, the impact probability would appear low since the "window" of orbits allowed from the data would be wide. As we got better observations, however, this window would shrink, but the Earth would stay inside it since it's near the center. Thus, for a time the probability of impact would go up, since the Earth would take up a greater percentage of the window. Eventually, though, the window would shrink past the Earth and the probability would go down again.
I suspect that this is what will happen. Could easily be wrong, though.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Crazy, I was just checking my bookmark on this when the slashdot article popped up. Anyways..
Here is the wikipedia page explaining the Torino Scale. I still wouldn't worry about it until the thing hit at least a 8 or so. The article gives a nice explanation of what astronomers would do in warning the governments in the event they thought this thing deserved any real attention.
Torino ScaleTry not to let life get in the way of living.
I don't see the original author having posted it yet, so here's a link to an interesting theory regarding the possibility that what we're looking at is in fact just the upper stage of a rocket launched some time ago.
~Lake
Keep in mind that the very nature of the situation will result in the probability slowly creeping upward until (hopefully of course), it is eliminated entirely. The very nature of having a low-probability situation whose likelihood has to be determined with continued measurements to increase the precision of the prediction means that as the likely set of paths is refined, the cylinder that represents the likely set of paths of the asteroid shrinks. Because it shrinks, the probability that it will be at any given point in that cylinder goes up.
At the point when the cylinder is projected to miss Earth entirely, the probability of impact will suddenly go to (very near) zero. In other words, the very nature of the situation regarding refining the data we have means that the probability will creep slowly upward before it goes to zero. (This happens for all close encounters, of course; it's just that no one's watching the actual probabilities for those too carefully.)
So the steady rise of the impact probability may be disquieting, but it is not unexpected and does not actually indicate anything particularly additionally troubling going on.
1 in 37! Nice. =)
(Roulette has 18 black, 18 red, and 1 green for those not in the know.)
Education is the silver bullet.
Here's something odd. April 13, 2029 is a Friday. Friday the 13th is the end of the world.
-gjr
1) Get off our island earth and spread. Mars?
2) Create powerful space based energy weapons to destroy this big rock.
3) Profit?
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep
If all we do is break it up, but don't generate a miss, there will still be an impact. The kinetic energy of the collision is based on mass and velocity, which the asteroid would still have virtually all of. If it can be converted into enough pieces, the surface area might be increased to a point where each piece burns up in the atmosphere (I doubt the real possibility of this, but I'll go with it as a thought experiment) - but that would still deposit all that kinetic energy into our system, it would just be as therms in the atmosphere rather than shockwaves through the ground. I have no idea what suddenly dumping something on the order of thousands of megatons of energy into the atmosphere would actually do, but I can't imagine it would be all that good from our point of view.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
This isn't Hollywood, it's highly unlikely we would actually consider blowing it into little pieces. What is far more likely is that we'd try and give the thing a series of small taps at strategic points in its orbit to deflect it. Also, you'd more likely want to try and nudge an object not so much into a different orbit, but to change the angle of inclination. If the orrbit is changed to that it is mostly above or or below the plane of Earth's orbit and passes through it at a safe distance from the actual orbit, then the risk is permanently removed.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Ok, how else do you plan on getting a League of Super Friends formed? Think people, THINK!
In reality, I would hope whatever plan they would use would break it into small enough pieces that the majority would burn up in the atmosphere.
Don't Panic
it can be the next X-Prize. First one to destroy the rock wins.
On a lighter note.. So, what do you think will kill us first, this asteroid or global warming?
It isnt going to hit the moon, as it is on the other side of the earth when the asteroid is suposed to hit.
Just think of the possibilities. You could build a asteroid-proof shelter in your backyard, and then, when it's clear that the human race has only hours left to live, you invite all the cute chicks from your neighborhood into your shelter, so that can ... ehem... repopulate the Earth.
Finally, slashdot readers get laid.
This would almost make it worth wiping out civilization as we know it.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I thought two green? A double zero and a zero?
The IRS income tax deadline in 2029 will be Monday, April 16th. I think, perhaps, I'll file for an extension that year.
Specifically, I used a 0.0003 meter grain of salt with a density of 2165 kg/m^3 (suggested by the I'm Feeling Lucky result for how big is a grain of salt) at 17km/s and 45 degree impact, and dropped it in 1000 meters of water.
Results
- Impact Energy: This projectile is so small that it burns up during atmospheric traverse
- Crater Formed in Seafloor: Are you kidding?
- Earthquake: It burns up in the freakin' atmosphere!
- Radiant Flux at 100 km: You're an idiot.
I really don't see what you're so worried about."Survivor: Asteroid Impact"
You compete with 20 others to get a spot in the emergency bunkers.
No holds barred.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Zhu Guangya is a physicist and is a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He has been instrumental in shaping China's development programs for the A-bomb and the H-bomb. Being a strategic scientist, Zhu has helped create the country's long-term development of defense technology.
Noting his crucial role in country's technological development Lu Yongxiang, president of china handed over a certificate of asteroid possession to Zhu at ceremony and workshop last Sunday.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
Does everyone in the world get a free Taco if it hits a Taco Bell?
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
American roulette wheels have 2 greens. There are a few tables here in Vegas that have single green, and the smart roulette player (oxymoron) will take a few minutes to find that table. Most of the big Strip casinos don't carry them, or may have one, tucked away somewhere. The off-Strip casinos are a bit more open with their roulette wheels, or placement of low-minimum blackjack tables (try finding a $5 table at one of the big Strip casinos after 5PM).
really!! do some research
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
According to this calculator the crater would be about 9 kilometers in diameter, it would cause a 7.1 strong earthquake and a 44 m/s shockwave a hundred kilometers from the epicentre. (Assuming 90 degree collision angle and iron composition - basically, the worst.)
Note that this assumes 4940 megatons in kinetic energy, and Nasa says it's "only" 1600.
...should the odds look grim and there's only x-small amount of seats off planet, I would wager it's the guys with the biggest guns and the willingness to use them who would get off planet, and I doubt they would let any civilian politicians or generic stupid random rich farts go for a ride either, they would tell them to fudge off. To get loyalty from their other troops, they would hold a lottery for the last few seats, to insure no counter revolts, with winners only announced at the last second. Maybe.
Even then it might not occur, jealous other military forces might attack with such force that no one gets off the planet at all. And by 2029 I *doubt* we will have much of a space launch ability anyway, I think a thousand all at once would be pushing it. I've weatched the space race since going outside and staring up trying to see sputnik, and frankly, it ain't all that far along compared to what I thought would happen way back then. and even with rutans and virgin airlines help, it still won't be that much further along in the 20's unless there's some sort of dramatic breakthrough to replace chemical reaction rocket engines. They are just too expensive for huge mass production, require a lot of people to get a few people off the ground and lots of work. And you'd still have the problem of how would you get the ground crew to cooperate? Like stated, what good is money. Now, maybe large balloons, or blimps might be sufficient, not sure, but it would be worth a try and a heck of a lot cheaper to mass produce..I bet mass prouction you can make decent Model T blimps for the price of a car. Add in some groceries and grog, good to go for a week of floating above the destruction. Earth quakes and Tsuanmis you could fly over and float around for awhile until things settled down. Even if the winds blow ya around, so what, let em. strap in.
That might be more doable on a somewhat larger scale than just 1,000 people. You would think after a few days it would be enough settled to reland someplace.
Me,with a big ole asteroid coming in, and say no blimp or rocket, naked barbecue! Dead mans dinner, surf and turf! Well,proly wear a grease spatter apron, got to be practical about these things. Then kick back in the lawn chairs and watch the show! Hmm, maybe loot a bank and play monopoly with real money and deeds to properties waiting for it to show up. sort of like new years eve countdown.
Ya, ya, I know, you young guys all thinking the same thing, "hang out with the ole lady ya tarded fool, get you a bunch..."..Sure,sure, sure, sure, but get that out of the way the week before the show. I mean, you can get lucky anytime, how often do you get to see a PLANET SMASHER hit? We are geeks, some things are just *important*.
Anyway, that one is too small, need a much larger one for a good fireworks show. The Mayans claim no history past 2012 anyway, something like that I was reading.
Mainstream media can only handle one natural disaster at a time, and the one that happened NOW is more important than the one which has a 2.7% chance of happening in 25 years.
Also, we should expect the probability of impact to continue to increase until it either goes to zero (most likely) or 1. This asteroid has a sigma of 0 - that means the MOST LIKELY path is impact. More observations are most likely going to eliminate the outlying paths first, so as we eliminate more and more of the outlying paths of possibility the most likely path will be more and more likely.
Until we get the observation that says "Ah, yeah, definitely going to miss", and then it'll be zero again.
paintball
Yes, some, possibly. But keep in mind that a decent-sized nuclear blast should be enough to fully vaporise that rock. Most of the vapor will be dispersed over a WIDE area (just how wide depends entirely upon how far away it is from Earth when destroyed). And most of that vapor will have a trajectory significantly altered from the original path of the asteroid, and will miss Earth entirely. The real key is to hit it when it's well away from Earth, and preferrably well away from the Earth's orbital plane.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Latest NASA update shows limited chance of impact.
1 in 56,000.
Looks like the odds have changed again. Down to 1 in 56,000 - It's even a zero on the torino scale now. Check it out here.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2004mn4.html I don't know what happened, but it's suddenly a 0 on the torino scale, etc. And impact date has changed to being 2039+... could that mean a return trip from the sun or something? Whatever happens, seems this story is over.
And, in fact, hitting the page now (15:30 Pacific time), it's clear that the risk is gone; the object is now a Torino 0 (for all projected future encounters).
Most Slashdot readers we'll be long dead by 2029. Most probable causes of death: 1) Cheese fries, 2) Toppings on Leftover pizza gone bad, 3)Heart explodes from extremely high levels of caffeine combined with causes 1 and 2.
Is this A) Government trying to keep it secret so they can cause less panic ? B) Simple mistake C) NASA cover up so they can relocate everything and save millions and be the only survivors. Not A as the government CAUSES panic, not dampens it... Not B as a mistake from 1 in 37 probabilty to now 1 in 56,000 is not exactly in the margin of errors that people would expect a government agency to be within. :o /me covers private parts with aluminum foil
It seems the updated measerments striked it out from the list. Torino 0, cumulative probability 1.8e-5
FYI.
/ neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2004mn4.html
"JPL has updated its 2004 MN4 risk assessment, dropping its Torino Scale rating to zero, and eliminating completely all impact solutions before the year 2037. Overall impact probability is put at one in 55,556. "
Source:
http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm
http:/
Move along, nothing to see here.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2004mn4.html