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Unknown 7m Asteroid Almost Impacted Earth
xp65 writes "A previously undiscovered asteroid came within 14,000 km of Earth — just over one Earth diameter, 1/30 the lunar distance — on Friday, and astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before closest approach. On Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST, a 7-meter asteroid, now called 2009 VA, came only about 2 Earth radii from
impacting our planet. This is the third-closest known non-impacting Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid. The asteroid was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey and was quickly identified by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge MA as an object that would soon pass very close to the Earth. JPL's Near-Earth Object Program Office also computed an orbit solution for this object, and determined that it was not headed for an
impact." The article notes, "On average, objects the size of 2009 VA pass this close about twice per year and impact Earth about once every 5 years."
The article doesn't say what level of damage would have resulted from an impact. Anybody want to weigh in?
Nice of them to let us know the next day.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
Way to sensationalize an asteroid that isn't much bigger then a womprat. If it had hit the Earth, very few people (if any) would have even noticed.
In horseshoes, hand grenades, and apparently, astronomy.
0100010001101001011001 0100100000011010010110 1110001000000110000100 1000000110011001101001 0111001001100101
a flying rock! call a geoligist!!!
I used to target womprats in my T-16 in Beggar's Canyon back home.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
And a bad slashdot thread.
sigh.
mod away and throttle this IP address !!!
Dang! It's the third time they try to ship my package and miss; I've had enough... And so much for the "confidential" packaging!
Seven meters just isn't all that big. According to the Earth Impact Effects Program using typical data: No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface. The air blast at this location would not be noticed.
From the summary of the article:
"On average, objects the size of 2009 VA pass this close about twice per year and impact Earth about once every 5 years."
I don't want the asteroid to land on my house, but it seems that missing an object this size isn't catastrophic.
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...because 7 meters is really small and pretty much harmless?
If the threat were 7m asteriods, no one would be monitoring. We'd certainly not be talking about the possibility of mass extinction. Yes some people might die, just as some people die every day. The reason to monitor near earth asteroids is the big ones that can kill off most of the life on our planet in a very short period.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think we should just point the LHC up into the air and deflect the asteroids with it.
There's a lot of debris out there that we aren't tracking. It wasn't all that big but there were some even bigger ones lately just not as close. The odds of getting hit by an even bigger one? A 100%. It's really just a matter of time. There really needs to be more effort put into mapping what objects we can. 7 meters isn't worth the trouble due to the lack of it being a major threat. Even once most of objects are mapped there will always be the chance of a rouge but it'll drop the odds of a surprise hit dramatically. If we continue in space a system of space based detection needs to be in place within the next 100 years. Yes the odds are slim of a major strike in the next 1,000 or even million years but it's very possible and we aren't potentially talking about saving lives but all life and at the very least civilization itself. We spend more on a single war than a comprehensive program would cost.
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Why do they have to turn perfectly good nouns into verbs?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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Hey, to be fair, it was kdawson who added the part which basically says "By the way, this was no big deal".
The enemies of Democracy are
Sometimes, I think scientists want to make us paranoid!
Hey, to be fair, the astronomy community regularly covers such events. It seems that it's Slashdot that likes to bring up the perils of NEOs more than anyone else.
I think I need a car analogy to fully understand this story.
Bearded Dragon
It would most likely bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 8980 meters. Minor local damage might occur if a larger fragment happens to hit a house.
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?dist=0.001&diam=7&pdens=&pdens_select=8000&vel=17&theta=45&tdens=2500&tdens_select=0
Thanks for not rounding that off to "nine kilometers" or even "about 10 km" as some less mathematically-inclined contributors would have done. If you've laboriously and precisely calculated that 2009 AV is exactly 7.000 meters in diameter, has a density of 8.000 g/cm3 and will hit the atmosphere at a 45.00 degree angle at exactly 17.00 km/s, why give up that hard-earned precision in your result?
what if it were made of nquadria?
what if we didn't see a 20m asteroid? how about a 100m asteroid? this 7m one makes us think about those possibilities as a completely valid concern
fear mongering is a big problem in this world. but the antidote to fear mongering is NOT complete imperviousness to fear. that's just as idiotic as fearmongering. what you need is balance between panty twisting hysteria and unresponsive inertia
fear is a healthy emotion. it keeps you alive. its a valid motivation, when combined with intelligence
so the proper response to this event is to invest in more monitoring. what is motivating that response? fear. genuine, intelligent, prudent fear
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...Oh, wait... 'almost' hit the Earth... Nevermind... Move Along, Nothing To See Here...
I shoved some numbers in, making it quite dense with the recommended average velocity for an asteroid, impact angle etc and got the following results:
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 1.00 km = 0.62 miles
Projectile Diameter: 7.00 m = 22.96 ft = 0.00 miles
Projectile Density: 3000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 7.79 x 1013 Joules = 0.19 x 10^-1 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 5.1 years
Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 54000 meters = 177000 ft
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 34300 meters = 113000 ft
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 13.7 km/s = 8.49 miles/s
The energy of the airburst is 2.75 x 1013 Joules = 0.66 x 10^-2 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
Pssh. 7 meters? Come on outer space, for all your terrifying voidsomeness you sure aren't flinging much in the way of horror our way. What's this I heard apparently Apophis now isn't even a threat. And the Tunguska incident? Hate to break it to your outer space, but nobody was living int he area you hit. Yeah and you'll probably point out the dinosaurs. Sure sure. Let's see you land a decent hit a little more often then every few million years.
What's wrong outer space? Having trouble hitting a mote of dust floating in a sunbeam?
I have nothing compelling to say
not with asteroids.
A 7-meter wide asteroid isn't very big and would almost certainly explode high up in the atmosphere, causing no damage on the ground, except for random meteorites that reach the ground. For that sized object, I would paint a bull's eye on my roof so I would get to see a nice show.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
I didn't know they could resolve a 7m asteroid, that's amazing !
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None. We were hit by one about 10 meters across on October 8th but no one wants to put the story out for some reason. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news165.html
It all starts at 0
that would be man'kind', as it came to be known?
Good find.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
(If the link breaks, the book is Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English usage)
The link is not broken, and here are two snippets that jumped right out at me:
"But since part of the criticism seems to be based on the erroneous notion that that the verb is derived from the noun based on functional shift, we must first pursue a little "
and
"But impact was a verb in English before it was a noun."
and
"This is not a case of a verb derived from an earlier noun."
In summary:
While impact as a verb has been around for a long time, it was not until the '80's that it began to be used in business and political contexts as a buzzword substitute for 'affect'.
To the extent that the link supports that view (m-w says you can avoid impact(v) if you like, but does not suggest it's in any way incorrect, and has numerous examples from the 70s), it's talking about the figurative uses of the verb. Whereas the usage in question here is the literal use of the verb, and is 100% irrefutably correct usage since 1601.
So if that usage "sounds wrong", I think the advice of Meriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is to get over yourself and your incorrect notions.
The enemies of Democracy are
NASA states that
On average, objects the size of 2009 VA pass this close about twice per year and impact Earth about once every 5 years.
That doens't make this seem like terrifying news?
I didn't fully appreciate this obvious tidbit until I saw the nifty fictional end of the world done as a news program, "Without Warning".
Detecting these rocks depends in large part on their lateral motion with respect to the star field -- we see them as moving across the stars. Those that are headed right for us are not moving across the star field. They appear (or would if we detect them) to be stationary or nearly so, and simply growing in size as they approach. The small ones don't become visible at all until very close, so it's not uncommon to detect them after closest approach much less in that very short period when there is visible lateral motion -- as it whizzes by close enough to smell.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Why do some idiots persist in claiming that a near miss is actually a "near hit". Every time there's an article about an asteroid missing earth, or a plane coming close to another plane, some retard argues against a statement in the article saying it was a "near miss" and insists that their superior knowledge points to the obvious fact that it was a "near hit". However, this is completely wrong. There's no real term as a "near hit".
"Near" in this context defines distance rather than relative causality. A "Near Miss" means "The objects came near to eachother, and missed" as opposed to the clear misinterpretation that it must mean "The objects nearly missed eachother."
Oh hell.. I'm lazy.. Here you go.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_miss_(safety) The damn phrase is a term. Whatever you may believe it to mean, no matter how you semantically break it down and decide that reporters must be wrong, the phrase DOES actually have a definitive meaning. Go with it.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
...Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck reported the nondescript need to do something involving a drill at or around the exact same time...
If this is so important and true, how come there's no wikipedia article on 2009 VA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=2009+VA&sourceid=Mozilla-search
The summary claims asteroids this size pass this close twice a year, and hit once in five years. That means a lot must have passed this close and not hit. But yet the summary also claims that it has been seen only twice before.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Whenever there's one of these asteroid articles I go to JPL's impact risk page and calculate the current cumulative impact risk of all listed NEOs. I do this by taking the tables at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ and copying them into a spreadsheet. Column D is the cumulative impact risk per entry. I take the sum down both tables in that column.
According to the 10 NOV 2009 list of 259 NEOs, the cumulative impact risk over the next 100 years (plus a few extra years for the couple rocks calculated farther out) is 1.52%, or a 1 in 66 chance, or a 98.48% chance that none of these will hit Earth in the next hundred years.
None of THESE. This is the list of *known* NEOs. As TFA testifies, sometimes they sneak up on us.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hot Fudge Sundae has been postponed again. If this had been actual Hot Fudge Sundae the government would have covered it up.
I know, I know, the answer is probably, "Yes!", but this thing came within 14,000 km of Earth. I know there's more than a few satellites out at that orbital distance. Did any of them get hit? They never seem to mention the catastrophic consequences to global navigation, communication and weather prediction should one of these objects pass just close enough to take out some key orbiting satellites, let alone hit the planet. Yikes! if one of these flying rocks ever takes out a bunch of satellites as it cruises through!
Did they change the definition from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless" yet?
I know MS has been advertising Windows 7 a lot, but to sponsor a near miss with a 7m asteroid - that takes some doing.
Although this baby didn't hit Earth, and wouldn't have done much damage if it had, it came close enough to potentially knock satellites in Medium Earth and Geosynchronous Earth orbits out of the sky.
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Thankfully NASA's primary function is moving towards Al Gores climate change agenda, other wise we might have better monitoring of stuff that really exists. Like asteroids.