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Fifty Meter Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2098
eldavojohn writes "The Bad Astronomer brings word of an asteroid discovered with a tiny chance of hitting Earth. While it's only 50 meters wide, it could have the impact of a 20 megaton bomb. It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098. The real story here is how a remarkable telescope, dubbed Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, that went operational in May found its first potential target in our growing impact alert system for Earth."
don't care.. sorry..
We can always send Bruce Willis
"...might... ...tiny chance... ...could... ...if..."
When my Mayan calendar runs out in just a few short months?
"Bomb the rubble", Mr. Asteroid!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
(emphasis mine)
...
He's going to be a lot of fun at parties towards the end of 2012
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thankfully most of us will be dead by then.
Free Martian Whores!
First, let's figure out what this "Nature" is and what it wants. Then, let's stop it in its tracks!
Everyone gets their panties in a wad over this type of thing every few months. Why are we worrying about something with an infinitesimal chance of actually happening almost a century from now?
We'd better freeze Bruce Willis, just to be sure.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
Now about that asteroid, sounds like a problem! Quite a pickle.
If we launch Rosie O'Donnell into orbit now, her gravitational pull will divert it away! Yay!
TO BLACK-WATCH PLAID!
Fifty Meteor Asteroid's Might Hit Earth In 2098
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
IPv4 address should run out by then, or not, things will be hotter, or colder, social security may have crashed, or not, the USA will be a socialist nightmare, or not, God will make a sudden appearance, or not, and the Beatles may reunite, or not.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I hope by that time we have an army of Super Soilders in Iron Man Suits that could take care of that nasty asteroid.
An impact by something like that is about the same as exploding a 20 megaton bomb.
So yeah, bad.
Wiki:
The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was the "Tsar Bomba" of the Soviet Union at Novaya Zemlya on October 30, 1961, with an estimated yield of around 50 megatons.
So this impact would be 40% of the Soviet test. How badly did the Soviet test harm the Earth?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
If the astronomers issue press releases like this every month, what happens when an asteroid really comes close?
Well finally some good news after all this doom and gloom lately.
Hope it hits something that needs to be hit and solves some sort of a problem of that time.
You can't handle the truth.
88 years to move 20 million miles? The thing is only moving 26MPH relative to us, and it's only 150' in diameter. How many kilacalories (since everything else is in imperial) in a megaton of TnT? That doesn't seem like it would be packing 20 megatons of kinetic energy.
Who wants to bet we won't do anything about it until late 2097? Probably be a big issue in the 2096 elections and then congress will be paralyzed by partisan divisions for the first half of 2097. Only the rapidly approaching 2098 mid-terms will force them to focus on the, also rapidly approaching, killer asteroid.
Either the asteroid is travelling at 26mph, or that conclusion doesn't follow from the given premise..
We've had one. Ronald Reagan.
And the discussion is about an Asteroid, Limbaugh will be dead by 2098 so who cares?
Absolutely right, emphasis on the tiny chance. Where are my mod points...
U+F8FF
I bet there will finally be some flying cars by then...
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Bellus is approaching!
From the summary:
Which sounds impressive - until you realize just how empty the Earth really is. Across probably 80% of the Earth, a 20 meg explosion will produce few (if any) casualties. Doubly so since that size range is likely to breakup and deposit most of it's energy in the upper atmosphere.
Phil, you've done lots of good stuff, but you're just reaching for the hits and ad impressions with this one.
Twenty megaton blast? Meh. We've seen worse.
Of course, I'm sure where it strikes will make a bit of difference.
Happy people make bad consumers.
When it gets here, fusion power plants will only be 50 years away.
Will we be on IPV6 by then?
20 megaton? Hell, we did better already. Let's just hope it doesn't hit some crowded area.
Not much. Kind of a bummer if the asteroid isn't nice enough to land in an uninhabited part of Siberia though.
Well, hopefully it gets the same memo we sent out in 1908.
Today countries all over the world cling to ethnic and religious differences as primary societal foundations. As long as that is true we will have never ending war. This asteroid is a gift of a single unifying foundation for all of humankind to unite around. Working together to deflect this asteroid will diminish those cherished divisions along ethnic and religious lines. Once we are done, the young generations will see no reason to go back to hating each other.
Troll? Didn't you see the news story? Obama said "We can absorb a terrorist attack." http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/22/130040247/obama-says-we-can-absorb-a-terrorist-attack-your-thoughts
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The real story here is how a remarkable telescoped dubbed Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System that went operational in May found its first potential target in our growing impact alert system for Earth."
If you go looking for trouble, you'll probably find it.
So now we'll be alerted about every possible, improbable and potential risk that might occur at some distant time in the future. I can see two stages to this: fear and panic for the first few "alerts" and apathy for all the rest. Then, one day, a really BIG threat will be discovered. One that is imminent and everyone will ignore it since none of the preceding ones amounted to anything. Shortly after that, the one remaining scientist will crawl out from under the rubble and say "I told you so".
Let's save all these announcements until there's a real and present (to use the cliche) danger. One that we can actually take some actions to mitigate, rather than just run around waving our collective hands in the air.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
telescoped [tel-uh-skohp-dee] noun, a process that runs in the background waiting for incoming photons. ... found its first potential target."
Usage: "here is how a remarkable telescoped
Given the rapid improvements we are likely to see in anti-satellite weapons in the next few decades, I doubt asteroids of that size will be any significant threat by then so long as we know about them in advance. Its small enough to blow up. Bigger asteroids, or ones we don't catch till a day before, are the ones that will kill people. Even if its solid iron I imagine we could nudge it offcourse with a handful of well aimed rockets.
If I'm still alive then, I'll head to the expected impact site. Best funeral pyre ever!
That would be home made Kombucha. Maintaining its' usefulness come hell or high water.
A "gram of TNT" is defined as 1 kcal, or 4.184 kJ. So a "ton of TNT" is a million grams of TNT, or 4.184 GJ, and 20 megatons are about 84 PJ.
And every president since has been more showman than leader.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I mean, someday. But probably not from this. Most of us will be dead from something else long before.
Best Slashdot Co
Leave Paris alone, can't you see she's suffered enough.
I wouldn't say HW Bush, Clinton (first term) or GW Bush were showmen.
Clinton went that way in his second term at times, but in the end, following the Impeachment, tried to settle down and establish a legacy, by attacking Serbia and then trying to get Israel-Palestine hammered out.
HW Bush should have been a little showman and he would have won reelection in '92 and W never had the public speaking skill down to be a showman.
They JUST found this thing. The amount of data available to determine it's orbit isn't enough to know exactly where it is going. HOWEVER when they dig up some old sky photos they will find earlier positions of this thing. The more earlier data points the better they will be able to predict it's path. Usually this means that the odds of an Earth impact will go down. It's happened before with other newly discovered objects.
"And every president since has been more showman than leader."
Yes, but not Mr. Reagan... a man who spent the entirety of his life making films in Hollywood. No sir, not a showman at all.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
I still have 88 years to invent warp drive :)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
HW was a weak showman but also a weak leader, so I think that counts. Clinton was always a showman, and quite a good one. W was pure PT Barnum, he actually had people believing that he was a Texas cowboy and not a Connecticut Yankee. "There's a sucker born every minute" is the only way to explain Bush's two terms.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The /. summary reads " It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098". This statement seems to imply that because it is 20 million miles away it will take 88 years to get here. That implies a very poor understanding of basic math and science skills. 20 million miles is just not that much in terms of astronomy. The earth is about 93 million miles from the sun, and covers a distance of over 300 million miles each year as it falls around the sun. 20 million miles would not take this rock 88 years to reach us, the real issue is that its orbit and the earth's orbit don't intersect until 2098. Until then the rock may be closer or farther than 20 million miles from us, the 20 million is just a distance it was away from us at one time.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Wouldn't it be reasonable to belive that if we shot a nuke directly at it, that it would either destroy it or at least push it away using the concussion? Either way 1) I won't be around so I don't care and 2) it will be the most cost effective thing our gov't has ever done. Also our military uses reactive armor....what if we used that to "catch" the asteroid? Then we could drill a hole it in for a real "space mountain" or make it a obscure version of "James and the Giant Peach" (hotel) We could call it somethiing dumb like Disney Universe and plant a flag on it with Mickey Mouse.
20 megatons is not a very powerful explosion. Didn't the Russians explode a 57 megaton thermonuclear device back in 1961? Apart from nuclear fallout, nothing particularly catastrophic had happened. Since most of our planet's surface is not populated, the odds of an asteroid hitting a populated area is not very high.
So, our children may witness a 20 megaton explosion in some remote location. Not a big deal.
I was concerned until I realized that I'd be dead by then. But then I thought that being dead wasn't really an improvement on being killed by an asteroid. At that point, I wasn't really concerned about the asteroid anymore. Now I'm just trying not to think about it at all, because I don't want to be killed by old age or an asteroid.
Couldn't you have used just the Unit System the whole world uses???
By that logic they should have also written it in Chinese, the most popular language on the planet. However, /. is U.S. centric and so using miles is perfectly rational. It might have been better to not give a measurement is meters. but those of us in the U.S. are not as up tight about that sort of thing as some people. Now excuse me while I open another 2 litter Coke.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Even if this asteroid did impact the earth, the impact would still be smaller than the yield of the 50 megaton blast produced by Tsar Bomba in 1961. So as long as it doesn't impact any populated areas, we should be fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
TFA says its 20 million miles away as if that's a lot. Typical meteor closing speeds are in the ballpark of 50,000 mph, so 20 million miles (or km) is nothing. It's 2 weeks. It's not going to hit any time soon, not because it's 20 million miles away, but because it's going to go make a bunch of orbits around the sun, and so are we, and in oh, 80 years or so, our orbits might intersect again after we've both traveled many billions of miles more.
It kinda makes a difference as to whether or not it will hit the earth or break up first.
Now if its 50 meters of plutonium that would suck.
Can it not be that all politicians are showmen on some level and that when a given politician wins, he's convinced a plurality of voters that he is the best of bad choices (and various other voters that he is a good choice)?
Ronald Reagan was an entertainer? Does it count when you don't know you're doing it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Hiroshima explosion was about 15 kilotons, and it managed to destroy some substantial portion of the city. If 20 megatons is a good estimate for the energy of this thing... well, it'll be bad even if it falls at some distance from a city. If it fell in the US anywhere east of the Mississippi, there'd be a huge number of casualties. So no, not world destroying, but if it hits somewhere even moderately populated... yeah, bad.
i plan on being dead by then...
As long as Chuck Norris is alive, earthlings need not worry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtQPBHhiAQI
... which movie? Doesn't Paris always get hit?
You pussies. We've already airburst 50 megatons. What a bunch of pussies.
I was thinking recently that we were lucky that most of the ecosphere-killing events in our history were astoundingly long ago and that our local space should be pretty clear by now. And then I realized that the dinosaur extinction event that happened 65 million years ago took place when the Earth was about 98.6% as old as it is now. If the Earth was now a day old, the dinosaurs were wiped out at 11:40PM. Suddenly those past catastrophes seemed not as comfortingly ancient.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098."
The Earth covers twenty million miles in 13 days.
Perhaps it won't hit us until 2098, but this has nothing to do with being 20000000 miles away.
They way things are headed, who knows? I live in NYC and another attack is always in the back of my mind...sucks.
The world ends in 2012.
how bad is it that my first thought was "Cool!" ...
I'm astronomer, I've been waiting to be relevant to the safety of humanity for a while...
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
Are we *really* still talking about potential asteroid collisions as though it's quite possible to happen? Didn't any of you hear of project Deep Impact? The alleged asteroid material extraction and analysis mission? Come on. Project Deep Impact, named after the movie?!! ROFL nt at secrecy. The impact from the probe altered the trajectory of the asteroid.
In honor of Arthur C. Clarke, shouldn't we name this asteroid detection system SPACEGUARD? This is the name Clarke gave a similar system that appeared in some of his books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceguard
hist teh uglu hiltons?
(Well, you get the semantics of the previous sentence. I just don't fell like using backspace tonight)
That is what the US public seems to want.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Monkeys might fly out my butt!
Kilgore! Great you're back.
Now where's Laszlo Toth?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... Working together to deflect this asteroid will diminish those cherished divisions ...
You will have to wait for a different asteroid since this one is "only 50 meters wide". At this size it could be safely nuked so its more likely we'll be upgrading nuclear devices and their delivery systems to reach and intercept such a small fast moving target. Numerous nations can manage that on their own.
Hello Jeremiah Cornelius.
I spoke to you here once, & many years ago, where I stated I liked your posts generally (& I also said you might need to "mellow out" a touch & calm down (but, imo @ least, you're just 'passionate' about the subject matter you speak on @ times)).
Anyhow - in said post, iirc? Well - You did me a favor & turned up a list of the 12 or so "hidden/anonymous" people (RICH wealthy bankers) who were at the meeting of the original enactment of the "Federal Reserve Bank" (yea, "federal" alright)... I wanted that info. @ that time too!
So, rather belatedly (but, better late than never)?
I thought I'd pay the favor back by pointing you to this website (you might like it, though you're probably aware of much of it, here goes nothing) -> http://www.topdocumentaryfilms.com/ ... Enjoy!
APK
P.S.=> I figure it's subject material that's "right up your alley"... yes, I am "off topic", but I have not seen your name here the past year or two, so... there you are! apk
See subject-line: One of my FAV flicks of the past decade (very early on).
(Plus, he's cool to boot!)
APK
P.S.-> Plus, face it guys: Any guy that can nail a chick like Demi Moore (she has always been "hot", no questions asked, & ages like wine too) as well as Cybill Shepherd (during their "moonlighting" period 85-89) HAS to have his shit straight! apk
we will have converted its mass into computronium anyway.
What is the big deal? If it is 20,000,000 miles away, and will arrive in 88 years (770,880 hours or so, ignoring leap years, etc) it will impact the earth at very nearly 25 miles per hour ... seems more like a North Korean nukeular bomb ...
Have I mellowed? :-)
I do remember you looking into this, and our "chat". You used the specific legal term "real persons" vs. merely "legal persons". I'm not liable to forget...
Thanks for the link. I suppose that there is a lot to mine here. Do you have favourites?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The last time I caught Plait living up to his marketing gimmick, it was also about asteroids. He fell into the common trap of starting with the descriptive statistic (an asteroid of X size has hit every Y years on average) and assuming the predictive (last one hit Z years ago so the next one is due in Y - Z years). He should know better. These objects are independent. One has nothing to do with another (unless the happen to bump each other). If one hits today, the next may hit in a billion years or tomorrow. While you *can* make an average out of X events in Y years, it tells you nothing that can be used for anything.
This time it has to do with reporting science vs. reporting news. This NEW system has found one object that its calculations suggest something about. How accurate and precise is it? That can be estimated but can't be proven without replication and comparison with other instruments. And apparently if it has been, they haven't arrived at the same conclusion. This rock does not appear in the SENTRY data as displayed on NASA's NEO Program impact risk tables, not even as an only recently observed object, as of 27 Sept. It's not among the objects removed from the list either, so the teams contributing to SENTRY haven't seen it or the data associated in order to check the validity of the instrument, much less the claims. Things are not as PANStarrs says, or they're making claims without corroboration.
There *is* an object with a 5.5% chance of impact in 2095 -- 2010 RF12. But it's a whopping 7 meters diameter. And having been observed for a whole 3 days, that probability is extremely likely to fall drastically. That one object kicks the total cumulative impact probability up over 2% for the next century, but only for now. The cumulative will probably fall right back to the 1.5% before this object appeared.
But as for 2010 ST3, nowhere to be found. Real astronomers should know better than to announce something from a new instrument as though it's a conclusion. At best they have a data set for the SENTRY people to check over and verify their measurements. Other real astronomers should call out the ones who make such claims. Bad astronomers, masquerading as bad science writers, obviously would rather pretend to refute some aspects of the implications without bothering to talk about things like validity, replication and responsible reporting.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
2098 was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop..
is it full of bugs?
I didn't use that "real persons/legal persons" stuff etc./et al, but I did state to NOT let the world "get to you" (because it does me as well @ times, how "f'd up" it is/can be)... but anyhow: My favs. there? Too many to note, but I like these sections best there:
Conspiracy
Drugs
Economics
Environment
Politics
Science
Psychology
Technology
Some of them you MUST "take with a grain of salt" though (especially the one about Atlantis, not sure what section it's in but... well, it's kind of TOO "way out", imo @ least!), but on the whole? Great stuff, & I am sure you will enjoy it!
APK
P.S.=> Additionally? Yes, it seems you have "mellowed" (I think I just caught you on a day when the world was weighing heavily on you is all (you seemed rather upset is all, & I too @ times can be that way, especially when I look around me & see what's "going down" out there))... apk
So How in the heck are they planning to stop this if the asteroid is a over 20 million miles away?
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not my problem