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Asteroids Flyby — 2010 RF12 & 2010 RX30
Ernesto Guido writes "Two small asteroids (2010 RF12 & 2010 RX30) will pass within the Moon's distance of Earth today, September 08, 2010." One is 6-14 meters and the other is 10-20, so even if they change course, don't expect Bruce Willis to be called in.
so even if they change course, don't expect Bruce Willis to be called in.
So, we should expect maybe Mini-Me?
Living With a Nerd
Is there any chance it will hi&^8@
&/.'[#
no carrier
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I never saw Armageddon when it came out and never bothered to rent it since. I heard so many bad things about that movie.
If you look at this picture from the site you'll see the trail isn't straight.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w189/walcom77/2010_RF12_120sec.jpg
This is a UFO. Finally, proof.
that I wish there was some way to direct these things. There's some buildings I know of that need some renovation, if you know what I mean.
"Is the problem that they are always being detected too late to do anything with them?"
It can be, if they either come from the direction of the sun, or from the galaxy center where there's a lot of bright stars and other things moving, it can be more difficult to spot them. But while they're zipping past the earth at high speed is probably not the best place to intercept them anyway, as you need to get up to the speed 'n direction that they're travelling, and that direction is going to be altered somewhat as they pass by the earth, chasing them slightly further out is more likely going to be a lot easier. If there was enough interest in it.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
yes MR bond that's my plan if they don't pay up there buildings will come down.
This isn't such an unusual event (it's just unusual that it's two in one night). It seems with asteroids zipping by fairly frequently, one should be able to do a lot of science on these: impactors, maybe stick a probe to them somehow, etc.
Is the problem that they are always being detected too late to do anything with them?
What would you want to do with them?
-It's much too small for mining.
-I don't know if we want to waste a probe, or other measurement device on that (a probe would perhaps significantly affect the behavior of a rock that's only 6 meters long anyway, making the measurement useless).
-If we want to find out what it's made of, we can just blow it up with any regular old cannon (aim, fire!), and analyse the debris.
I say we wait for a bigger one.
A 20 meter asteroid is not all that small ... if it actually hit the earth, it could potentially make a few million people have a really bad day.
So you know how much time in advance you will get if something really coming this way next time. Much bigger and problematic ones probably would be easier to spot and predict with more time, but still is pretty scary.
Most rocks that come this close to Earth are in orbits tied to Earth's and will come close again every few years. If we wanted to put a probe (or a manned lander) onto one of these, we could target one we've spotted before and arrange to intercept it on a future visit. There's no obvious incentive to visit one the moment we spot it.
Just to be sure something like "Live Free, Die Hard" doesn't happen again.
In fact, I'm a big fan of slinging stars after asteroids. We could do it in the same style as throwing a perfectly good virgin in to a volcano, but with less loss of anything worthwhile.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In the sequel, the team travels back in time to pickup Bruce Willis (before he dies) and then goes back 2 billion years to alter the proto-moon's trajectory with an atomic sledge hammer so that the Earth's orbit gets changed just enough that it is no longer in the way of the next on-coming asteroid. However, the time machine is damaged and crashes on the Earth leaving Bruce and his lovely co-star to become the human race's Adam and Eve. And you are worried about technical accuracy????
The neat part, as stated in the article, was the fact that they were dectected a ways out and not last minute, like most of the rest that have gone whizzing by.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Here...
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
With new observations, updated orbits show that the last time these objects got close to Earth was September 9, 1915, so these are apparently natural bodies, not "lost" interplanetary junk.
Assuming the smaller asteroid is 6m in diameter and made of somewhat dense rock and moving at 17 km/s (typical for asteroids), the impact would have an explosive yield of approximately 12 kilotons, just a little less than the yield of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The bigger one, assuming it to be 20m in diameter and also made of dense rock and moving at 17 km/s would have an explosive yield of 434 kilotons, roughly equivalent to a warhead of a modern Minuteman or Trident missile (see this site for the calculations). While they're no planet-killers, they could still cause some serious damage were they to smash into some populated region of the earth.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Tax them? Make them pay a toll?
so even if they change course, don't expect Bruce Willis to be called in.
LOL
Good idea! Stupid that I hadn't thought of a way of making profit.
Silly me was thinking only of gathering knowledge and information, which is actually spending money, rather than earning it.
TheRealNimoy
Hey !! 44th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek.Thanks for all the great comments. And Happy New Year to those who celbrate today. LLAP
Coincidence????????
rewriting history since 2109
2010 RF12: "It just happened, RX30. It... "
2010 RX30: "Sure, sure, I know... it just happened. Coulda happened to anybody. It was an accident, right? You tripped, slipped on the floor and accidentally stuck your dick in my wife."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The big one already passed by harmlessly. The little one will likely do so in a few hours.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Sounds like an alien attack to me. They're just closing in on the correct range.
Have gnu, will travel.
Most rocks that come this close to Earth are in orbits tied to Earth's and will come close again every few years. If we wanted to put a probe (or a manned lander) onto one of these, we could target one we've spotted before and arrange to intercept it on a future visit. There's no obvious incentive to visit one the moment we spot it.
Surprisingly, the Obama administration is proposing a manned mission to some of these smaller chunks of rock. Lockheed-Martin wrote a white paper on a proposed mission to an asteroid using the Orion spacecraft that can be accessed here:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/ssc/Orion/Toolkit/OrionAsteroidMissionWhitePaperAug2010.pdf
The missing planning is still at a very early stage and there is no reason to believe that Congress will necessarily fund such a project, but it seems like this is a cheaper option than going to the Moon or to Mars, and at the very least would help to prove deep-space manned spaceflight capabilities for missions to other places.
While there won't be an incentive to visit an asteroid right after it is spotted, there are some smaller asteroids that have already been spotted that might make some interesting targets in the future.
Could we at least have one of the Bridges?
Pay up where? Which buildings will come down?
I wish one of these things (if they were solid metal/rock asteroids) would have airburst a few miles out to sea off of major city, like New York, blowing out every window in the city and scaring the crap out of people. That's about the only thing that will wake the idiot populace to the fact that these things present a real threat (besides an actual hit of course), like earthquakes/tsunamis/hurricanes/tornados. I'm not saying we should bankrupt ourselves on a threat with this level of probability. But it definitely deserves more attention than its getting (a few million dollars globally a year?), I'm sure the US Federal Government spends more on paper and pens then the whole planet spends on NEO tracking. We should have 2-3 full time orbital observatories and/or a dozen ground based telescopes dedicated to watching for these things. Stoping them would be insanely expensive but just knowing if their comming is chumpchange and could still save a lot of lives.
The current cumulative impact probability of all objects tracked by SENTRY now exceeds 1.5% for the next 100 years. This is from ~300 known bodies with non-zero impact probability. They estimate that they've discovered 10% of such potential planetary post hole diggers.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If they changed course significantly in the time between (say) this press release and their closest approach, then it is time to be calling Bruce Willis.
For them to garner an appreciable course change on that timescale, then they've got to pass relatively close to something pretty big. CORRECTION : something pretty massive, not necessarily something particularly big. And more importantly, it's something massive, pretty near the Earth, and which hasn't been seen before until now. That makes it something that's either extraordinarily dark, or very small and massive.
I'd be calling up Bruce Willis and sending him up there to find out what the hell this massive, dark/small object is. I doubt that Willis would do anything useful, compared to the roboticised observatories that would go along with him, but it'd be fun to watch him choke when the air runs out and he realises that it's a one-way ticket.
Oh, I missed one possibility - that the unknown object has a peculiarly strong electromagnetic field associated with it. Bussard Ramjet, anyone?
Damn, now I'm going to have to do some research to find out the trajectories and see if one simple perturbing object is possible.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"