Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out

An anonymous reader writes with a followup to previous news noting the possibility that an asteroid would collide with Mars: "Further observations have reduced the odds of asteroid 2007 WD5 impacting Mars to approximately 1 in 10,000. According to NASA this asteroid followed the same pattern of increasing in probability, then finally being ruled out as a threat."

Comments

NEO prediction needs more funding

[QuantumG]

Well, actually what it needs is a comp-sci department of a major university to take it on as a research project and apply for many many government grants for super-computer time. Simulating a chaotic system is never easy, but failure to calculate the orbit of a large NEO could be catastrophic.

Re:NEO prediction needs more funding

[Anonymous Coward]

The limiting factor is observation, not computation.

This sucks.

[Grishnakh]

A big-ass asteroid hitting our nearest planetary neighbor and causing massive damage would have been a good wake-up call to humanity. The only thing that would have been better would have been a big-ass asteroid smacking the Moon, leaving a crater large enough to see with the naked eye from Earth.

Re:This sucks.

[QuantumG]

Nah, that'd be worse. At least one astrophysicist would say that this is what the he Moon is for and you'd have the media repeating it and eventually everyone would believe the earth is immune to NEO.s.

Re:This sucks.

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, but you're the dumbass here.

If a Tunguska-sized asteroid (or worse, a Yucatan-sized one) is en route for earth, and we have 20 years' notice, it wouldn't be that hard to launch some nukes up there to nudge it into a safe orbit in time. We went from Sputnik to landing on the moon in less time than that, and all we have to do is make launch systems capable of taking our already-existing nuclear warheads and planting them on or near an asteroid some distance from earth (but probably less distance than Mars, which we have no trouble sending probes to). The only thing that's actually preventing us from deflecting asteroids is the fact that we don't have any prior warning of them, simply because we don't bother to look for them very hard.

You talk about correcting the orbital patterns of an asteroid as if it's an impossible feat, but as I've already shown, it's quite realistic. The problem is just knowing about the asteroid in time to do something. A nuclear weapon can move an asteroid only slightly. With 10 years' notice, that's all you need. But if the thing is going to hit the earth in 1 day, the amount of power needed to move that rock would be astronomical. So who's the dumbass?

As for "infinitesimal", as if an asteroid strike is unlikely, there are craters all over our planet from large asteroid strikes. I live a short distance away from one, in fact, located at "Meteor Crater, Arizona" (it's on Google Maps; it's where the final scene of Starman was shot incidentally). There's a much, much bigger one on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico which was an extinction event. And in recent history, a comet came down in Tunguska, Siberia in the early 1900s, wiping out a huge amount of forest. If that had been a populated area, instead of a remote frozen tundra that even now is mostly unexplored, the devastation would have been greater than any natural disaster in history most likely. Another asteroid (or comet, not much difference really) striking the earth in the next few hundred years isn't as unlikely as you suggest, and certainly a much bigger worry than the Sun reaching the end of its lifespan, which we're fairly certain will take several billion years, which is more than enough time to deal with that problem.