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Asteroid To Pass Near Earth On Monday

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-look-you'll-go-blind dept.

TigerNut writes "Asteroid 2011 MD was discovered on June 22 by LINEAR, and its flight path will take it within 8000 miles (12000 km) of Earth. Orbital predictions indicate that its flight path will be significantly altered by this close approach."

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't underestimate the energy of small asteroi by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Getting hit in the upper arm by a spec of sand might not hurt you, a human, but it would be devastating to a colony of microbes living on your arm in that spot.

  2. Re:Cars? Houses? Pets? People? by Seumas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First of all, it is so small that it wouldn't even hit the earth, so the entire analogy is goofy.

    If the asteroid did strike, it would probably explode in the upper atmosphere — a fine spectacle, but harmless.

    An asteroid would have to be thousands of feet to create a nuclear winter. I'm sure it could be reasonably smaller and still destroy all life on Earth. The one that may have wiped out the dinosaurs was apparently about 42,000 feet. Whatever it was that hit Tunguska is suspected to have been a couple hundred feet. The asteroids expected to pass near earth this century We have one about 1,000 feet coming in 2029 that (if it hit) would be 65,000 times more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima.

    Worrying about something so small as this is just silly and, frankly, anything that won't wipe out an entire city is fairly insignificant, as far as I'm concerned. I'm thinking about the real threats out there that we couldn't give a shit about, because our society is more concerned with having a pothole filled than a disaster averted (or they're all too busy eagerly hoping for Armageddon, so their goofy prophecies can be "fulfilled").

    I punched in what numbers I could find on this object and if it were to hit the earth, it would be "barely audible" even within one mile (5dB). The object has to be significantly larger to even form a crater of any kind. All you'll end up with are small fragments that hit all over an area. I suck at math, but I suspect that with as little of the Earth that is actual land mass and then the even smaller percentage of that which is populated, the odds of even one fragment hitting a populated area are extremely small. It's not like a 25ft or 50ft object is going to hit and burst into fragments directly over a metro area. (I mean, possible, sure, but extremely unlikely).

    Here, you can punch in numbers on this and other objects hitting earth, yourself: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

    I only really played around with porous and dense objects hitting earth; not a body of water. The couple quick checks I did on it hitting water (depending on depth, of course) show that it would have to hit really close to shore (within a few miles) to have any real impact on the shoreline.