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Chance for a Tunguska Sized Impact on Mars
Multiple users have written to tell us of an LA Times report that an asteroid may hit Mars on January 30th. The asteroid is roughly 160 feet across, and JPL-based researchers say that it will have a 1-in-75 chance of striking Mars. Those odds are very high for this type of event, and scientists are hoping to witness an impact of a similar scope to the Tunguska disaster. From the LA Times:
"Because scientists have never observed an asteroid impact -- the closest thing being the 1994 collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter -- such a collision on Mars would produce a 'scientific bonanza,' Chesley said."
From the article:
"Normally, we're rooting against the asteroid," when it has Earth in its cross hairs, Chesley said. "This time we're rooting for the asteroid to hit."For all we know mars is a lifeless planet, but still....rooting for the asteroid to hit is just plain mean, bad karma. I hope it doesn't hit. Not only because of my ...uhmmmm.... nickname connection.
It'll probably take something as dramatic as a direct hit from a meteorite to finish Spirit or Opportunity off.
informed the UAC base on Mars of the impending DOOM that is heading there way?
that it will hit some of the rovers?
"Msar Bomba!" (Oh, come on - you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
Um, so first a huge collection of rocks smacks into Jupiter, now another may hit Mars, and they're excited?
They sound awfully like ranging shots to me, I'm more inclined to get Venus to light the third cigarette and then be wery, wery, qwiet...
If it does hit or in some other way cloud the atmosphere of Mars, would this put the brakes on current and planned future studies of the planet?
A few years of darkened skies could finish off the rovers, or require better orbiting surveillance equipment, no?
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Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
We'd be talking about it for decades. It might actually wake up some people to the NEA threat to our own planet. It might have a devastating and instant effect on the atmosphere of Mars.. which could actually make the planet a little warmer and a little more hospitable.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Even if it misses it should still be a little interesting. If it comes that close, its orbit will be greatly affected, observing the results should be useful?
...if an Tunguska-sized impact occurs on the side of the planet we can't see, did it really happen at all?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Nothing in solar orbit can stay occluded by our moon for that long. That's for about half of the moon's orbit! If I'm wrong about that, someone please draw me a diagram. *mutters something about lousy science reporting*
*** Ponder
If the asteroid does hit the impact site would probably make for a good rover mission. Fresh samples of long buried rock without the extra hassle of having to dig it up!
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The impact would probably send dust high into the atmosphere
No signal, indeed. I seem to recall dust interference inhibiting communications recently. I bet the Spirit and Opportunity teams are not so excited.
#!
How long would it take to get to the impact site, bearing in mind that it travels at an average speed of 1cm per second, and that dust in the atmosphere from the impact will probably drastically reduce it's recharge ability?
I think you'd get there quicker by launching another rover mission!!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It doesn't actually say it will be occluded for 2 weeks behind the Moon, it just says that it is currently occluded and it will be 2 weeks until they can calculate it's course. I assume the need to watch where it's going to predict it accurately.
That spells bad new for the community and the Council of Elders. I wonder what K'Breel has to say about it.
Get the cameras rolling, I'm sure it'll be a better impact then the Beagle meteorite simulation of a few years ago.
:-)
(I do feel bad for poking fun at Beagle, many people much smarter then me put a lot of work into that probe.)
If this was venus, I would love to see it impact it, but it would be better if it was not mars. The reason is that it will lead to "nuclear winter". Mars is already cold and does not need more. If we have any chance of colonizing this planet, it will be only if it warms up. In addition, with lots more dust in the air, any future exploration vehicles will require nuclear power. Of course, if hits one of the poles, it might just melt all the CO2. Hmmmmm.
It would be interesting to see venus be hit. If that happened, it might just cool down the planet a bit. Of course, I suspect that it it would take a pretty big one
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If it's gonna take two weeks to get enough observations in to pin down its orbit, fine. Throwing in the fact there happens to be an occultation somewhere in there, which will last, what, an hour at most? That confuses the issue to the lay public. It's irrelevant for refining the asteroid's orbit. The article makes it sound like the asteroid will be hiding behind the moon for the entire period, when that can't possibly be the case.
*** Ponder
The received wisdom used to be that the meteorite, that caused the disaster in Tunguska, exploded above the surface of the earth. It entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle and heated up much more than it would have if it had come straight down. The result was that a long relatively narrow area of forest was knocked down and there was no impact crater.
On Mars, the atmosphere is much less dense than that of the earth. The meteor in question is large. If it hits Mars, it will reach the surface, it won't vaporize in the atmosphere. The result will be much more like other impacts on the earth that did leave craters. In that light, the comparison with Tunguska doesn't make much sense. I don't know where Steve Chesley got his information on the size of the rock that exploded over Siberia but I bet it wasn't 160 feet across. Something that size would make it to the Earth's surface.
I couldn't find an answer immediately by googling and someone that is more fascinated by this than I am probably knows already. If they do, what would such instruments indicate (other than the obvious vibrations) - could something else be concluded from what they register? Something about the composition of the planet?
"Disaster" is a pretty hypy label for an event which led to no known loss of human life or property, and caused no significant environmental damage (yes, a lot of trees fell and some wildlife may have died, but it's not like it destroyed an ecosystem or led to an extinction of any species).
Most modern industrial projects are a bigger "disaster" in this sense than Tunguska. The event should be referred to as "phenomenon", or maybe just a "boom", but not a "disaster".
I'll bet they are. Because we have this nice dense atmosphere to sustain our breathing, we tend to forget that mars has only 2 or 3% of the surface air pressure to heat and absorb energy from an incoming rock like we have. The damage will be from a direct surface hit at the rocks full speed and should be visible if it hits on our side of mars, and it will no doubt toss up a few megatons of ejecta, which due to the speed of the wind, will take a while to settle. That does have the possibility of finishing off the rovers. There is a slim chance some of the ejecta may even make it to earth and be found on the antarctic snow eventually, giving us a few more samples of our neighbor to study.
:)
If it hits where we can see it, it should be quite a show and I hope they have a good number of our telescopes, even Hubble, recording like crazy.
I guess we'll find out January 30th. But if its on the far side, we may have to do before and after photo comparisons to find the crater once the dust has settled, and that won't be near as informative as a near side hit would be.
Humm, recently the chinese were accused of doctoring a moon photo. Makes me wonder if the moved crater might in fact be a new one?
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
10) there is no 10, but it sounded like a nice number
-- Wichert Akkerman
Mars gets hit, Mars blows chunks, Earth gets hit by Mars chucks, Andromeda strain wipes out life on Earth (like it did on Mars in the past) /Just sayin'
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Prime Directive and all that.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Four days after my birthday. A nice little birthday present from the Universe. Too bad gift wrapping an asteroid is pretty useless :-/
what will the effect be on the mars rovers i wonder.
Only by mouth-breathers.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
The article makes it sound like the asteroid will be hiding behind the moon for the entire period, when that can't possibly be the case.
Intelligent asteroid?
It just occurred to me that the astronomer being quoted might not have been referring to an occultation at all. That's a pretty rare event for any given asteroid. It's possible that the astronomer was referring to needing to wait for the bright moon to get out of the sky at the same time the asteroid is up, which can take a week or more, depending on its current phase. The extra extinction caused by a bright moon might be enough to prevent the detailed observations needed to get a good orbital fix on the asteroid. This still doesn't excuse the lousy science reporting, which flat-out declared the asteroid was behind the moon, and implied it would remain there for two weeks.
*** Ponder... there is a martial Bruce Willis to save them.
...view just before it embedded itself in Natalie Portman's cleavage...
You must be referring to a different Natalie Portman. The one I know has none of this "cleavage" you refer to, without a serious application of duct tape.
Portman's *ass* cleavage ;)
:)
Hope it's not hairy, Ms. P
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This article is worthless to me because it doesn't give information in standard astronomical units of measure. I need to know how many hiroshimas and how many school buses this thing represents!
Ack ack ack ack, ack-ack ack ack-ack.
Ack, ack ACK-ack-ack, ack-ack ack-ack ack. Ack ack, ack-ack-ack-ack, ack ack ack.
Ack ack,
Ack-ack Ack-ack-ack-ack.
Remember the famous Face on Mars?
The Sandia labs simulation of the Tunguska impact has its own face - forward the video to 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Face of Tunguska!
Clearly, the Face on Mars is the "thumbprint" of a previous Tunguska event!
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
It's not an asteroid! It's Planet X! The Niburu are returning to enslave us all as has been predicted for centuries! There is a lot of good info out there on the internet about how the power elite on Earth have been in contact with the Niburu since some time in the 50s. Time has been manipulated and we've been fooled into thinking that where we are today is where we're supposed to be. But we were much more advanced technologically in the 1940s and 1950s until some of the other alien races started messing with our time stream. They've altered our reality and now we're powerless to defend ourselves against the Niburu. We're doomed! DOOMED!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Somehow I get this mental image of one of the rovers watching that fat rock come whistling down and flattening it, all the while transmitting images of its own impending demise. And to top it off, seeing Slim Pickens on top of that bastard, whooping it up and waving his cowboy hat around.
I gotta quit chugging those cans of Amp if I am to keep what is left of my sanity...
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Tunguska (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event) wasn't an impact - Barringer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barringer_Crater) was an impact.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
NO CARRIER
The saddest poem
Orbit viewer for 2007 WD5: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007%20WD5;orb=1;cov=0;log=0#orb
Loos like the asteroid could come close to Earth's orbit in 2011. Hope it hits Mars before that!
All Rights Reversed.
Being in the same size class as the 1908 Tunguska asteroid, they should be fine (earth wasn't darkened by giant dust clouds in 1908, no?) While the article says that there will be a significant dust plume, I guess it'll seetle more rapidly and be more localized."
You've perhaps missed the recent news that puts the bulk of the Tunguska event's destruction on the preceding fireball & blast wave when the (now presumed much more smaller) asteroid exploded in the atmosphere, while making the 'size' of the object itself strictly dependent on composition - "Because of the additional energy transported toward the surface by the fireball, what scientists had thought to be an explosion between 10 and 20 megatons was more likely only three to five megatons. The physical size of the asteroid, says Boslough, depends upon its speed and whether it is porous or nonporous, icy or waterless, and other material characteristics."
Since the atmosphere on Mars is much thinner than on Earth and primarily carbon dioxide, the Mars event will be more impact/strike related, where the Tunguska asteroid exploded before it had a chance to do much physical damage on its own.
The Phoenix lander is already headed to Mars. It wasn't designed to study an impact site, but we can be sure the mission group will be making interesting decisions if an impact takes place.
The scientists won't be nearly so happy if it hits Rover, or Spirit.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the crater is a kilometer away, then I'm sure it will be visited. If it's 10,000 km away, then it will have to wait for a completely new rover mission.
:)
If the crater is a kilometer away, then it's unlikely the rover will be in any state to visit it, or even report its state, and it will have to wait for a new rover mission anyway.
Hubble would be completely blinded by Mars, as well as being unable to focus that close.
> an asteroid may hit Mars on January 30th. The asteroid is roughly 160 feet across
Just before it hits, we should broadcast messages to Mars saying, "And if you're even thinking about invading Earth, we got a whole lot more o' this waiting!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
rj
I find that a bit hard to believe, since Hubble has taken a few pix of the moon, even finding what purports to be our abandoned lander from one of the Apollo missions. But it did seem to me that pix should have been clearer if it was in good focus. As for blinded by the brightness of mars, the moon didn't seem to and its surface albedo exceeds that of mars considerably. Not to mention the incident brightness of the sun on the moon is several times that of mars in watts per square meter.
I'm not saying it would be optimum for the task, far from it, but its spectrographic abilities could tell us more about subsurface mars than all the little tinkertoy diggers we've sent in the past 40 years. Some of that I'll remind all, doesn't work inside our atmosphere, so if Hubble doesn't do it, it won't likely get done on a broadband basis at all.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the
Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Ahahaha lets see those little rover-turned-roadrunner bastards survive this! Oh man, if those little guys get a camera angle on the impact??? Sweeeeeeet.
You need more psychedelic art in your life. rhesusmonkey.deviantart.com
I think Taco Bell should capitalize on this opportunity. Similar to the target they placed in the ocean when Mir was falling back to earth. Free tacos for the all Earthlings if it actually hits.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=4152
Because scientists have never observed an asteroid impact --
When they mess up metrics/english conversion, they CAUSE them
Table-ized A.I.
What is it about the Brits and technology? The love Windows in the UK, they make horrible cars, their planetary probes fail, their airplanes suck ... they should stick to writing plays and outsource their technical projects to the Germans.
Geesh!! We send a car a million miles away, and STILL everyone just sits around waiting for a wreck!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Err, what about the satellites NASA and ESA has in orbit around Mars?
Mars Express
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
Both are kinda closer than we are so may get a better picture.
Just reading the comments, and wondering, wouldn't an event like this answer the question is there under ground water on Mars? An impact would vapourize any underground ice/water flows. This could save a lot of exploring!!!
Working for one of the companies that were involved in the Beagle 2, what is believed now is that the Beagle 2 made an orthogonal impact against the wall of a meteorite crater. The airbags and the rest of the landing system were designed to cope with a nice impact at an angle against flat ground. In the end it just flew straight into a wall.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
That's where Phobos and Deimos came from as well.
Maybe they get a baby brother for Christmas!
-Styopa
... don't suppose it would cost NASA more than few trillion to get a nice parking shed setup on Mars.
It's currently a 24th magnitude object which means it's extremely faint and can only be viewed from earth by very large scopes on dark nights. The moon's illumination makes observation that much harder.
The Nasa neo page for this object has more info about the asteroid.
recently the Chinese were accused of doctoring a moon photo
That was just a stitching error. There was no new crater and no doctoring.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/12/03/chinese-moon-update/
Phoenix isn't well equipped for this kind of mission. It has a decent stereo camera, but those have little value for studying freshly unearthed rocks. The rest of its instruments are designed to grab samples an analyze them in a built-in miniature automated laboratory, but the probe is immobile. It can't go out and get them. It's limited to what's within reach, and it can only deal with soil, not large rocks. The instruments were also designed with whatever is expected at the poles in mind.
A more likely candidate would be the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory, which is basically like the Mars Exploration Rovers on steroids...a lot of steroids. It will have a newly developed, much more accurate landing method and enough driving range to make up for whatever error there happens to be in landing. It will also have a comprehensive suite of geological instruments including a high power microscope and several spectrometers. It will be able to roll over obstacles around 2 feet tall to get to targets, and has a nifty laser chemical analyzer to inspect rocks out of reach.
If this rock hits and in a place even reasonably accessible to the MSL, you can bet the list of potential landing sites will very quickly be re-sorted.
I'm not sweating it. SG-1 already defeated Apophis in the fifth season.
Saturn has a ring system (probably because something smashed into an icy moon). Then we see impacts hit Jupiter. Now we're looking at a possible Mars impact.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but has anyone looked at a chart of the Solar System recently? We appear to be next on the list after Mars.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
You insensitive clod, I wear glasses.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Poor guy, looks like he's been the victim of a SYN flood, sending all those ACKs...
That model doesn't take into account the change in the asteroid's orbit that will occur from passing so close to Mars. I can only assume it will be on a very different trajectory even if it misses.
The Illudium Q-38 Explosive Space Modulator!
"Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to be a meteorite-shattering Kaboom!"
KABOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!!!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Release the demons from Mars,
Let them return and populate the Earth,
Dark beings,
Lovely beings,
Come and rule our crusty land again,
Oh ye Kings of Eternal Might!
Um, correct me if I'm wrong but:
1) Mars is close to earth right now
2) Mars is going through an area of asteroids/meteors
3) Earth is going through same area
4) Earth has higher chance of getting hit by undiscovered asteroids
I know we don't miss important things, but (looks other way at distraction while pretty woman walks by)
While we're complaining about reporting, what's this "one in 70" chance? Whether its going to hit or not is already determined, theres no random quantum events going on here. It'd be mor accurate to say "1/70th of the range of predicted courses, given current uncertainties in predictions, result in an impact"
asteroid hits Mars.
Right now, though, my CAPTCHA is "impact." That's creepy and I blame Vladimir Putin.
Don't panic.
So 1 month away and their accuracy of estimate is still 1 in 75? That's like the chance of me hitting a hat with a playing card from about 15 feet away.
I think scientists should make it well known how little accuracy we will have with asteroids approaching 1 month away. I think the general public believes that we'll have 6 months to a year advance notice of a certain impact, when the reality seems to be that we won't know with any certainty until like a week away.
My compliments on your superb aim.
I couldn't hit the side of a barn, let alone the side of a crater, millions of miles away.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
WD-40 hit Earth in 1953.
Could you follow etiquette and put your sig as part fo your profile?
Mars Express is currently orbiting Mars, and will be there to provide pretty pictures.