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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?
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
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!
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
On the bright side, this does solve the 2038 rollover of the 32-bit time_t.
Have you read my blog lately?
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?
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!
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.
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
And I thought the last crash of '29 was depressing.
-Peter
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
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
Plus, if you addd the digits in 13, you get 4 (April being the fourth month of the year.) On top of that if, you subtract 4 (month) and 13 (day) from 2029 and add those digits, you get 5 which is amazingly the same number that you get when you sum the digits in 202 and subtract that from 9.
Point being, well actually I have no point.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
See, I think that there's a difference and a gift in disguise here.
The reason why we don't have a system to deflect asteroids right now is because asteroids are one of those things that "could happen" in the far off future.
It's like smoking. It's not guaranteed to kill you, and nobody drops dead after a single puff. Some smokers live really long lives. So smoking is viewed as something that's "bad for you", not an instant death sentence.
Therefore, we've got a lot of people who smoke in the world.
However, pulling out a shotgun, pointing it at your face, and pulling the trigger is unquestionably lethal.
Therefore, the only people who do that are people who really want to die.
The difference is that we don't always think about things that *might* cause harm, but we always think about things that *will* cause harm.
This is just one of the many ways that the human brain is a little screwed up about risk management. It worked when we were on the plains of Africa and needed to evade predators and manage to survive, but it doesn't necessarily hold up now.
Now, the blessing in disguize is that a quarter century is very much long enough to figure out what to do. Remember, we've got more than enough knowlege to do it -- computers to plot trajectories, a variety of tested and untested propulsion and power systems, techniques, etc. In the quarter of a century timespan, we may just need to paint one side white to provide the push. So, in some sense, it's even easier than trying to go from nothing to the moon landing.
But what we lack, like most things in space, is a feeling of urgency to really do something about it. Thus, this is a blessing in disguize. If they give it a decent possibility of really hitting Earth, 25 years in the future, we've got time to do something about it in ways that if they said that it'll probably hit tomorrow we won't.
Same way I know several folk who, when their doctors told them that they were going to be dead in x years if they didn't quit smoking, were able to go cold turkey.
Gentoo Sucks
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.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).
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.
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
Latest NASA update shows limited chance of impact.
1 in 56,000.
Since global warming has already been observed, I'd say the chances are about 1 in 1.
More interesting is whether a methane burp from clathrates will result in a cascade leading to a global extinction event during your lifetime.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-