Tunguska Blast Was a Small Asteroid

malachiorion writes "The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."

Comments

Re:Hmm..

[teebob21]

Would there be any chance of a small asteroid (one that could cause some problems) currently heading for earth not be detected yet by scientists? Yes. There is a very real chance that a chunk of rock the size of a basketball court could come at us tomorrow. A very very small, but very real chance. Asteroids that come from the sunward side of Earth's orbit are harder to detect because they are obscured by the Sun. One could come from that direction and astronomers may never see it. Most of the meteors that streak across the night sky are space stones no bigger than your hand, and usually about the size of a pea or smaller. Larger ones come down, but very infrequently. It is impossible for astronomers to chart, track or project the trajectories of the billions of space rocks left over from the formation of the Solar System.

Imagine a world where a small asteroid fragment or comet had struck Russia 60 years after Tunguska - during the depths of the Cold War. It would be a very different world today indeed.

Currently Reading.

[Daemonax]

I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama', which opens with the lines "Soon or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers -- a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe."

In the book, we humans then go on to set up systems to track asteroids that may be a danger to earth, and set up defense systems against them. I know that we currently track some, but how well funded are these organizations that do this? This is really something that is quite important, as it is almost certainly just a matter of when, not if. Do we have systems in place that will allow us to destroy or divert any large asteroids that are determined to be on a path to impact with earth?

Insufficient political attention

[Kupfernigk]

The British MP Lembit Opik (name is Scandinavian) has attempted to draw attention to the seriousness of the problem. The media dismiss him as a crank. Watching him on television it has been apparent that television presenters and the like are bottomlessly ignorant on the subject, and because they can't admit it, they just seek to trivialise the issue.

OK, we shouldn't expect media people to know everything, but we are very poorly served by their almost total scientific ignorance. I suspect that politicians would have become interested in global warming much sooner were the mass media not so piss poor at explaining scientific issues to the public, and almost perversely proud of it.

Bad Summary

[anilg]

Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test?
Summaries on /. have started to deteriorate in quality. Was there any need for the above? Isnt it just pandering to the WOOWOOists? Why the need to add a tinge pseudo-science to science?

You wont add "Is it the by homeopathy? Ayurveda perhaps" to an article on a new medicine/cure..

Editors/Firehosers note.

/rant

Re:The Gist

[argStyopa]

I'm less concerned about a single city, which would be devastating but survivable.
What scares me more was the (2004?) near-miss of an asteroid that could have hit somewhere in Pakistan or India precisely when they were in the middle of a very tense standoff. With immature command/control systems, what are the odds that would escalate into a nuclear shooting war, which would kill not the 10's or 100's of thousands of a single strike, but the 10's or 100's of MILLIONS of the resulting conflict.

THAT'S terrifying.