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Small Asteroid Making 400,000 Mile Pass By Earth
AtariKee writes "Universe Today is reporting that a small 10m asteroid, discovered earlier this month and named 2009 BD, is passing within 400,000 miles of Earth. Although the asteroid poses no threat to the planet, the site reports that the asteroid is still very interesting, as it may be a rare co-orbital asteroid (as in, shares the same orbit as Earth)."
Am I the only one who thinks we should attempt to land on it and stage an emergency scenerio drill, just to prepare for the day when there is an armageddon-destined asteriod?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Does this mean my Pontiac is going to go on another killing spree?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Having NEOs in stable orbits around the Earth could be of benefit to mankind in the future as missions can be planned, possibly sending mining missions to these rocky visitors so we can tap their resources.
The Near-Earth-Objects in question are only 10m and 20m in diameter. How would it be of any benefit to us to mine resources from these? Surely it would cost far more in resources to -get- there.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
"That's no moon..."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
... I'm back to Privateer ...
Per
I can't call that English
So is something like this a top candidate for learning/testing asteroid mining, or are there other types of objects that are more convenient?
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Obviously we did already because there's a camera shot from the asteroid of Earth.
Obviously we did already because there's a camera shot from the asteroid of Earth.
That's not a photograph, it's a crappy 3D render.
http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/earth_toutatis_big.gif
Apparently I was not-so-obviously joking.
Ok, this is the third second moon?
They say there is nothing to worry about but it's just 640,000 KM away which is just outside the orbit of the moon at 400,000 km... yikes... a three body problem... not predictable...
Planet X Discovered!
Vulcan Discovered!
Kinda deflating... kinda cool anyways.
I know we can mount a camera on it pointed at the earth so we can see ourselves. EarthCamOne.
A co-orbital asteroid?? Does this make Earth a Dwarf planet? ;-) Isn't one of the criteria for planet-hood that the body has cleared its orbit of debris?
if the astroid is co-orbital, then the
earth is not a planet. thanks tyson!
your zeal to demote pluto seems a bit
off axis.
wiki def
Apparently I was not-so-obviously joking.
I think that the fill-in /. reply here is "WHOOSH".
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That's not a photograph, it's a crappy 3D render.
That's no moon....
(fuck you saw that coming didnt you?)
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
But a 10 meter diameter rock is a lot of material already in orbit that you don't have to pay propellant to get out of earth gravity well. Whether it is doable to have the refinery above or not is another story. But if you DO have the refinery, then it make a lot of sense to mine those NEO for materials, and use it to expand on existing facility above without to have to lift it all. Naturally it all depends on what type of maetrial you are looking for , and rarity of those NEO.
omg, we'all gonna DIIIIEEE!!
uh.... no, wait...
But if the asteroid and earth are on the same orbit, how exactly does one of those objects "pass by" the other. To invoke the inevitable car analogy, that's like saying two cars driving in the same lane on the highway can pass each other. I think, more likely, the would collide.
Seems to me Earth and the asteroid could be in nearly identical orbits and pass each other, or in the same orbit and never collide so long as they're travelling the same speed (or is it velocity?) but two objects traveling the same path at different speeds don't pass each other.
since the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
according to this java simulation of the object's orbit, it won't be this close again until about 2100.
Another AC\DC revival.
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Whenever I hear of something like this, I have to wonder if it is a "lost" interplanetary probe (or the upper stage of one, or some other related debris). With this orbit, 2009 BD could be an old lunar flyby, maybe from the 1960's.
Remember, the size estimate requires an albedo estimate, and rocket pieces tend to be very reflective, and thus will appear to be larger if the albedo is set too low, so if it was a spacecraft it would not be 10 meters, but maybe 4 or 5 at most. The Apollo 8, 10 and 11 third stages would be a possible candidate. (After Apollo 11, the third stages were impacted on the Moon to serve as sources for the seismometers.)
Such lost probes will return to near the Earth, but perturbations will tend to move them slowly further away with time.
3753 Cruithne is in a Earth resonance orbit and is the first asteroid called "Earth's second moon". I don't know how many we are supposed to have now, but with this one, it is at least 3.
If it shares the Earth's orbit, shouldn't its speed, relative to the Earth, be zero? Objects in the same orbit travel at the same speed, don't they? Am I just being pedantic?
I think we should go out there, grab it, and bring it back here. It'd make a great museum piece.
suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
Or just a coincidence, however unlikely that may be. With all of the asteroids wandering through space, it was bound to happen at some point. Reminds me of the thought I have every now and then about a photons journey from the sun all the way to your retina, and how many refractions and reflections that one photon has been through to end up in your eye.
true, it could be coincidental - earth may have captured it or it could be a total fluke, but looking at the simulation of the orbits, it sure *looks* like they were once one body.
probably it's a lost mesozoic space capsule.
Most asteroids are most likely actually just big piles of smaller material. They have very little structural integrity. If you tried to apply a force to one 'spot' on the asteroid the results would be at best unpredictable. Material would shift around, you might even just sort of push through it.
Another related problem is that you need to push against the asteroid THROUGH its center of mass. If that center of mass is not fixed, then you can't really do that.
Beyond that, even if the asteroid is a solid chunk of rock, you still have to despin it before you can push it, thus the whole operation becomes a lot harder, plus if it IS a rubble pile, then you may not even be able to despin it or it would be pretty hard to do so.
A gravity tractor on the other hand suffers none of these disadvantages. All parts of the asteroid are going to be attracted to the tractor. It may STILL be somewhat complicated, but probably less so. In any event we won't really know until we try.
Finally, what difference does it really make how fast you accelerate the asteroid? The point would be to put it on the desired course. Doesn't really matter if the mission is 1 hour long or 10 years as long as you get the results you want.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
While I'm pleased they have found my spaceship and not recognised what it is, it appears to have slipped out of parking orbit.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Hope Target as black tennis shows on sale, and plastic bags.
Can this asteroid be seen in the night sky without using any special equipment?
the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
So earth and this asteroid have a "history" that results in them still orbiting in the same social circles, but generally trying to stay as far apart from one another as they can, though it's always possible that gravity may draw them together in a catastrophic collision.
I can relate.
The enemies of Democracy are
The object in TFA poses no significant danger. More accurately, "posed". It's closest approach (691,200 km) was the day before the article.
No presently tracked NEO poses more than about a 0.13% cumulative impact probability for all its projected passes over the next century (2000 SG344).
But as more objects are located, and their individual cumulative impact probabilities are calculated, they're compiled into pages such as at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ . These objects don't care about each other and their impact risks are independent. Taken together, they sum. Individual target estimates don't change, but the total impact risk does.
At what point does the total cumulative impact risk (copy both recent and non-recent tables, paste into a spreadsheet, and sum down all impact probabilities in column D) become significant enough to merit serious attention?
2009 BD made the press but 2009 BE didn't. The latter was only 110,000 km farther, but 2.5 times the diameter, and passed by 2 days before 2009 BD. Recent and upcoming flybys are listed at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The total delta v required to get from Earth to Mars is somewhat under 5 km/s. In order to impart that kind of velocity to an asteroid you would need something like 10 huge nuclear rockets or something (and a small asteroid).
This is why it is important to detect these things well in advance. The delta v required to deflect something that is a year from crashing into Earth is going to be on the order of half the diameter of the Earth in a year. In other words VERY low. A year is really close. Realistically a few mm/s really IS all you need. That's the beauty of it all. If you can arrange it so that you're course correction is initiated at a favorable point in the asteroid's orbit, then the energy required is pretty trivial.
If you're talking about doing it very close, then we're WAY beyond any rocket technology we've even thought about inventing. The highest velocities ever achieved via direct power (not gravity assist) are on the order of 7 km/s and that is for a space probe massing a few 100 kilos. A 10 meter diameter asteroid masses on the order of millions of kilos. Practically speaking even with a gravity tractor and a required delta v in the mm/s range we aren't even close yet to deploying a system with the required capabilities.
And how many 1000's of tons would a 'net' of some sort weigh? On top of the reaction mass and engines, etc. Hard to say what will make sense at some point in the future, but gravity tractors at least would be simple and are far closer to being possible than anything else I've ever heard suggested.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
... whatever I saw not long ago, I'd described as a "fridge on fire falling from the sky". The picture does not serve justice to what I saw. http://edmonton.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20081125/meteorite_search_081125?hub=EdmontonHome
put some observation hardware on it and let's see where it goes!
Seriously, though, it intuitively seems like the danger from rogue asteroids comes from an intersecting orbit, with a high closure velocity prior to impact. This one may cause problems if it enters our atmosphere, but if it's already in a similar orbit, the energy dissipated would be mainly that associated with falling into our gravity well. How much energy is needed to cause Armageddon in this manner? (As distinct from the LHC manner of Armageddon, which seems more efficient, in theory...)
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
Did the camera make a clicking sound? :)
yikes... a three body problem... not predictable...
Actually, if the asteroid is only 10m in diameter, then, relative to the earth & the moon, it has darned near zero mass, at which point KANM theory [Kolmogorov Arnold Nash Moser] would apply.
*
Hmm isn't the fact that Pluto is co-orbital with other KBOs the reason is was demoted from the position of being a planet? Is that to be our fate?
Saying that this asteroid is passing by Earth is like saying that I just passed by Jessica Alba, even though I'm in Australia and she's in the US.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
...You couldn't land on the M key with your finger just now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think these little dudes are the reason that we do not deploy a satellite in L4/L5 (Lagrangian Points). Reason being, we do not know what all is out there in L4/L5. The mining end of things would be good, but you do not know what is floating out there and how fast.
StupidPeopleTrick
Bruce Willis can stay home.
Chances are there are a few good sized chunks in a big asteroid, BUT maybe it would make sense to get rid of the rest.
Now if we're talking far enough up the tech curve one might contemplate using the gravel for reaction mass to move the big chunks around. But that would be a LOT more technically complex.
In any case I'm not real sure why people worry about it at all. We wouldn't even be able to move this new asteroid as it stands, and it probably wouldn't do much damage anyway unless it smacked down in a fairly populated area. The BIG asteroids only hit once in millions of years, hardly much of a worry.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
In fact the beauty of the whole thing is that the only type of engine which is efficient enough to do the trick would be an ion drive anyway, which only produce on the order of maybe .05 N of thrust anyway, so even if you pushed the asteroid you still wouldn't be able to do so with large amounts of force. In theory you could gang up a whole bunch of those drives, but interestingly the thrust of ion engines is in the same range as the strength of the attraction of the tractor mass to the asteroid.
It really is a beautiful idea. .02 m/s x 86,400 sec/day means you can do quite a bit of deflection in a year's time, roughly 20,000 km. I'd think that would be enough to turn a collision into a miss in most cases. Now, if the asteroid were Apophis, which is over 100 m in length, then either the tractor would have to be a LOT bigger or the time frame is longer. There is a 1/5000 chance of a 2039 Apophis impact. We will know if this is going to happen after the 2017 close approach, thus we would have 22 years in which to apply the tractor. Say it was a 10 metric ton tractor, which is probably doable. I think we'd manage.
A really big asteroid, something in the range of 1000 m would be a lot bigger problem.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson