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Simulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By
c0mpliant writes "NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a simulation of the path of an asteroid, named Apophis, that will come very close to Earth in 2029 — the closest predicted approach since humans have monitored for such heavenly bodies. The asteroid caused a bit of a scare when astronomers first announced that it would enter Earth's neighborhood some time in the future. However, since that announcement in 2004, more recent calculations have put the odds of collision at 1 in 250,000."
But no cigar
That means we won the global armageddon lottery?
* O - Earth
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| ---- Asteroid
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These rocks are high in minerals which are very useful. Who'se with me, capturing this thing, and turning it into a gigantic orbiting factory?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
...that the odds were 4 in a million...
it's time for a war on space!
apparently there is a better chance of this happening than getting struck by lightning. http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/probability.html what happens when a slider tries to visit that world?
I'd rather see the simulation of it hitting earth.
With this asteroid coming so close to earth, obviously the flight path of it is going to change afterward. Any chance of this being captured in orbit? Or will this be flung somewhere else in the solar system? Or worse, coming back if it doesn't have enough energy to carry on?
Good thing it ony 250,000 to 1. If it were 1,000,000 to 1, then we'd be doomed
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Where's the OTHER simulation? You know... the one where this asteroid comes back and actually strikes Earth.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
You can't fool me: the System Lords are planing an invasion, aren't they? Where the hell are SG:1?
Earth will have been destroyed 17 years before this happens when Planet Nibiru crosses our orbit in 2012.
I think the asteroid that just missed us (was that last month?) came closer than this will.
the only difference is we didn't see it coming.
One can download Celestia and make your own simlation! It's not rocket science. It's not, it's astrophysics, and some astronomy math to get the orbit to work. But there is enough data on the net to recreate this... and then tweak it for the earth shattering kaboom!
I wish that someone would make a game of this... where you need to send up a vehicle, bump and asteroid and watch the change. Give us all a chance to crowd source the various "solutions". Learn just how friggin tricky this would be, how long it would take, how little effect we can have. All of this talk about "capturing this asteroid" on this thread alone is sad. The amount of energy in an asteroid's kinetics is astounding. This topic needs a dose of realism.
A POX on Bruce Wyllis!
I'm curious, will there be any effect felt on Earth, such as a change in tides? How massive/close would an object need to be for us to notice it? This is passing well within the orbit of the moon, but obviously it's much smaller.
Moon = 7.3 e22 kg and 384,748 km
Apophis = 2.7e10 kg and 29,450 km
I don't remember the entire equation, but the distance term gets squared, and everything else cancels out, so the relative effect should be:
(7.3e22 / (384748)^2 ) / (2.7e10/(29450)^2)
Am I close to doing that right?
Why's everyone so worried about this? We all know the world is going to end in 2012.
In that animation, the asteroid was apparently deflected by the earth's force field. Either that or I just don't understand what's going on. Can someone kindly explain what the video is showing?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I saw the RSS headline as "Stimulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By" and I just had to see what that was all about...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This is expected to come within our moon's orbit, right? So what are the odds of it impacting the moon? And if it were to do so, what would the impact do to the moon's orbit?
I'm surprised the original post didn't link to this article from Sandia National Labs. There is a pretty interesting analysis of what would actually happen if an asteroid did hit (complete with nifty graphics).
From the Sandia article:So what would happen during such an impact, really? According to the simulation, the impact would vaporize the asteroid, deform the ocean floor, and eject hundreds of cubic miles of superheated water vapor, melted rock, and other debris into the upper atmosphere and back into space. Much of the debris would then rain down over the world for the next several hours and also form a high global cloud, says David Crawford of Sandia's Computational Physics and Mechanics Department. The shock wave from the impact would level much of the New England region. The heat would incinerate cities and forests there instantaneously. The global cloud would then lower temperatures worldwide, and a global snowstorm likely would ensue and last several days to several weeks, initiating a "nuclear winter" that would create more hardships for earth's inhabitants.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
I don't know anything about Orbital Mechanics, but just for the sake of Robert Kennedy's ghost, I ask, "Why Not?" "IF" the entire planet said, "Yes, capture this object, regardless of cost, do it". Granted, by comparison of future technologies, it would look like a 1950's art deco solution, but what would it take to put this thing in orbit for the sole purpose of mining it to build orbiting manufacturing, and agricultural facilities? And just so perspective is brought into the mix. It really doesn't make sense that it takes 100's of millions of dollars to train geniuses to put a Nut on a Bolt in space. And why can't a Laser be used to slice the thing up like a Deli-Salami? or use a Laser to "Push" the thing around?
"What makes the Impossible, Possible, are Numbers." - Unknown
Why named "Apophis?" I thought SG-1 killed him off real good back in season four. What we've got to consider is whether the asteroid is in fact heavy with naquadah (which prohibits nuclear solutions). At least Sam Carter figured out that whole enlargement of the subspace bubble round the transport vessel -- barely got that asteroid to the other side of earth... We've got all the solutions we need, I figure.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Take into account that the astrophysicists are probably out of tune with current events, does this latest estimate account for Nico Marquardt's correction last year? I'd say that brings it down to odds of 1 in 2,500. The link above says the odds were reduced from 1:45,000 to 1:250,000 while Nico's correction originally brought it down from 1:45,000 to 1:450.
This strikes me as a great opportunity - the asteroid will be passing closer than any other large body has ever come to Earth. I wonder if it would be practical to land a probe on the surface as it passes by. This could provide us with a lot of great science.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Carter, I can see my house from here!
Sort of a Sim Space or Sim Asteroids hmmm mail it to EA I am sure they can screw it up some how lol
I do like the idea of making it a game maybe NASA could work with some third party and design something like that, another thing they could do is use the game to take some of the extra computing power and have a distributed network like Folding@home only more fun :)
We already have Armageddon and Deep Impact.
Given that we can measure the location of nearby space objects with fairly good accuracy and the laws of physics at that magnitude are not fuzzy as in smaller scales, what are the unknowns that make such an impact a 1 in X possibility and not a certain Hit/Miss?
You know, 1 in 250,000 is of course a very, very, very (very, very) low chance, but... it's still a not insignificant possibility. That's slightly (very, very, very, very, very slightly) scary.
Property is theft.
...There ain't no whales, so they tell tall tales, and sing their whaling tune :-\
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Additional computing power isn't really needed for this problem. JPL already has the Standard Dynamic Model they use to model all bodies in the solar system accurately, and the current hardware is perfectly capable of handling the problem.
What is needed to refine and understand the trajectory is more observations. Radar range and range-rate measurements, along with optical angle measurements are fed together to estimate the current position and velocity, and using estimation techniques you can estimate your uncertainty as well. In order to bring down the uncertainty, we need more measurements that give a better statistical sample and allow you to have more confidence in your averages. Sadly most people don't have radio telescopes are large enough optical telescopes (20"+ preferably) to really make a good observation. For that reason, it will probably take till 2013, the next close approach, to get a new set of data that will make it easy to determine whether there is a 2036 impact risk.
Show me the arcade mode
Actually, the discoverers claim that during the initial days when it was a 1/300 impact risk, a god of destruction seemed like a good name. However, it also turns out that they were SG-1 fans...
... just to give the complete picture of this.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How about we link directly to the simulation and dodge all the blog spam.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news146.html
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Oh I didn't mean for them to use more computing for trajectories (If they can land a man on the moon with a pocket calculator I am sure they can do just fine with any old Dell these days lol)
I just was thinking for general things like modeling a new shuttle replacement or stress analysis of parts so they do not have any more O ring type failures. Sort of a free super computer for NASA. Something computationally intensive hmm but I am not sure something that important should be run in some sort of distributed network. I have no experience in what kind of errors could be introduced. (no experience at all to tell the truth beyond setting up a mail server or a file server, things like that)
I like how the continental USA swings into view as the asteroid has its closest encounter, Hollywood wouldn't have it any other way! Would that part of the simulation be accurate? Australia might just survive this disaster scenario like all the other disaster movies where we dodge/jump the bullet/shark!
Ah. Probably the most useful thing, and the most computationally intensive, is going to be doing aerodynamics/fluids, whether for aeronautics research, reentry work, or planetary atmosphere science. Unfortunately, most CFD codes require a lot of talking back and forth between nodes, which isn't very good for a distributed computational network, since its bound to be communication limited. An alternative that works well for low-density flows (and thus has potential for modelling re-entry) is the Lattice Boltzmann method, where the hard math is done at each node independently, and so requires much less significant communication between nodes. Structural analysis isn't too bad computationally as far as I know.
I'm really more of a controls/estimation and sensing/systems engineering guy myself though, so I can't say for certain. I did some lattice boltzmann work as an undergrad, but really just enough to convince myself that I didn't want to do fluids.
Fly up there. Stick a Cigar on it, and light that cigar. Use the thrust from it to put it into a better orbit so that it can be mined.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
2029, I'm there dude, traveling won't get any cheaper!
You know way more about this stuff then I do (I hit my upper limits when it came to math dealing with the Carnot cycle when I was working on something I was attempting to get a patent on)
But your post will give me days worth of study just to understand it LOL I thank you for leading to me to new interesting things :)
I missed out in life I should have went with more math in school (its not that I am bad at I almost never make a mistake I just have trouble remembering formula's but then again I guess thats average)
*See this is what I am talking about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_equations
Omg.... my brain is melting just looking at it... I can do it but Jesus, I hope a teacher would be patient waiting for the answer lol
(X) - NASA funding
^
| ---- JPL
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Herve S.
maybe it will take care of that skynet problem for us
Now good ol' Luna, on the other hand . . . well, what's one more half-mile wide crater amidst the regolith, eh? I mean, not even an atmosphere to disperse a superheated shock wave - just a big crater, surrounded by smaller craters where the ejecta came back down on the moon's surface. Not even a whisper of sound! Just a miniscule flash (to we living, air-breathing types), easily missed. No real 'delta-v' for our moon, no funky tides here on Terra, nada. Now, I'll bet every astronomer with so much as a spyglass would be watching when it happens, and I'm sure there'd be spectacular photographs of the event, but aside from that it'd be a major non-event.
It was written in 1998, the year that two Hollywood asteroid-vs-earth movies (Deep Impact and Armageddon) were released.
Here's what it would take to capture Apophis:
I'm assuming that the capture will take place on the 2029 encounter and that the perigee of any capture orbit is equal to the closest approach distance (this makes the calculations simple enough that I felt like doing them to post on slashdot).
So to capture into a circular orbit would take an instantaneous delta-v of: 4.18455 km/s. (Capturing into a highly elliptic orbit (e=0.9) doesn't reduce the delta-v by all that much (4.13677 km/s instead of 4.18).
Assuming the mass on Wikipedia is right (2.7e10 kg), and using space shuttle main engines (Isp_vacuum = 450 sec), it would take 1.65e10 kg of propellant to achieve the 4.18 km/s delta-v. So, a lot. (More than 1 million Delta IV heavies worth of payload capacity to orbit).
Going to a higher specific impulse form of propulsion, like Ion thrusters with Isp from 3000 to 30000 would take between 3.58e9 kg and 3.81e8 kg of propellant, respectively. Though Ion thrusters are about as far away from applying an instantaneous delta-v as you can get (except maybe solar sails or other neat little things like that).
In conclusion, it would take a hell of a lot of effort to capture Apophis.
"Carter, I can see my house!"
Except that Celestia doesn't do gravity.
You'd have to use other software to create the trajectories, then use Celestia to display it.
C64 "Lunar Lander" did gravity, Braben's "Elite" did gravity, but nowadays even Eve does not do gravity.