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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 $699 license fees from all of you!
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Or, if you prefer, they are now at 1 in 1,000,000.
This edition of Fun With URLs has been brought to you courtesy of an overly trusting NASA webmaster.
Will Bruce Willis even by alive by then?
Play Command HQ online
24 more years to try and get laid.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/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
Would this be Friday the 13th?
That's right, Hot Fudge Sundae arrives on a Friday...
A dingo ate my sig...
Yes, April 13, 2029 is a Friday.
John.
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
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.
Try a tsunami about 500x times bigger almost a mile high traveling 20 miles inland destroying everything in its site.
Keep in mind 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of the coast.
Devestating indeed.
http://saveie6.com/
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
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.Even if the energy released in 2004-MN4's impact were roughly equal to the energy released in the recent earthquake, I seriously doubt that the effects could be considered comparable. For one thing, ALL of the asteroid's energy will be released in one gigantic explosion when it enters the atmosphere and hits the surface (either land or sea), concentrated in a relatively small area. But the earthquake's energy was released along a huge (700 miles long) segment of the undersea fault, which almost certainly dampened the effects of the quake. Not to mention that quakes typically take place at least several kilometers underground...
(IANAGOP -- I Am Not A Geologist Or Physicist. But I am using what I think to be logical deductions based on what little I know.)