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Asteroid Passes Closer To Earth Than the Moon on Nov 8
First time accepted submitter TheNextCorner writes "NASA scientists will be tracking asteroid 2005 YU55 with antennas of the agency's Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Calif., as the space rock safely flies past Earth slightly closer than the moon's orbit on Nov. 8. Scientists are treating the flyby of the 1,300-foot-wide (400-meter) asteroid as a science target of opportunity – allowing instruments on 'spacecraft Earth' to scan it during the close pass. "
I'm amazed I haven't seen doomsday theories regarding this yet.
50,000 characters used to live here.
WERE DOOMED
What we should do is send Bruce Willis with a master plan to slow it down, and get ourselves a new satellite.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Is the distance from the asteroid to the earth going to be less than the distance from the earth to the moon? Is the distance from the asteroid to the moon going to be greater than the distance from the earth to the asteroid?
...to land on a passing asteroid. That is, if we still had a space program able to carry a person to it. Heck, I'd even settle for a quick-launch of an instrument/rover/lander to take some video and transmit it to Earth in near real-time.
You might even be able to use it as a one-way intra-solar-system ferry if the asteroid was going close to the same direction you wanted the probe to go.
Top 10 Funniest of the year.
Corrected now...
APK
Perhaps it is too small, but what I do not see in the animation is a new deflection in the orbit with this close fly-by to the earth and moon. What will the new orbit be after the flyby?
Before it's too late...
Melancholia (new window)
That would be great, put it into orbit and use it as a space station/mining facility.. good times
If they call comets that are 9 million miles away near earth objects what in god name do they call this?? lol i beat there heads are gong to explode from excitement :]
Jack of all trades,master of none
I'll be impressed when ...
an asteroid passes closer than the space station to the earth.
(324,600 kilometers) or 0.85 the distance from the moon to Earth
Maybe I just re-read Lucifer's Hammer too many times, but I'm wondering what the margin of error is on this calculation?
If they're off by even 20% I can imagine some not good things happening.
Three Squirrels
According to TFA, the asteroid is mostly black and "aircraft carrier sized". The first thing that flashed into my mind was that it would be very interesting if radar images during the flyby revealed it was in fact a very, Very VERY old spacecraft.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
According to TFA, the asteroid is mostly black and "aircraft carrier sized". The first thing that flashed into my mind was that it would be very interesting if radar images during the flyby revealed it was in fact a very, Very VERY old spacecraft.
How about a balttleship instead?
http://www.starblazers.com/images/jun09/images/Starlogpages.PDF
DO NOT. REPEAT DO NOT watch this if you loved it as a child. The poor excuse for what passed as science and science fiction here made me think what a stupid ignorant child I was. Huge nostalgic letdown. By comparison Star Trek Original Series is realistic - that is how far fetched and bad the science is.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
hmmmmmmmm
Seems I just read me something about some country doin' some space stuff
Of course if we miscalculated the capture orbit and accidentally dropped the freaking thing on ourselves that would also solve the environmentalist problem. They would be annihilated along with the rest of us. Better still. There would be no environment left for anyone to fret over and fight about.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It's so good.thank you.http://www.1stbearing.com
Fat Poofta? Where?
You seem to know the subject:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/541440main_2005_YU55_approach.gif
Why is it perpendicular to Earth's orbit in that diagram?
Does not look this way in
http://www.vorchester.com/vnews/images/2005YU55Orbit.jpg
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's a shame that NASA posts a lame size comparison to a warship, instead of educating people with the much larger scale of this event. To wit:
1) Earth is a basketball
2) Luna is a baseball, orbiting about 30 feet (9m) away from the basketball
3) Asteroid 2005YU55 is a red blood cell (about 1/10 the diameter of a human hair), passing about 25 feet away from the basketball
The truly amazing thing is that we can see surface details on that red blood cell from 25 feet away.
This is serious! Aliens are targeting our moon!
We've got to do something! Congress needs to pass a bill!
A hot topic indeed :-)
After that comment comes a fall.
Then a win to slash dot.
Finally someone will spring to his defence to complete the circle.
This comment donated by a seasoned slashdotter.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2506460&cid=37933028
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago there was the Earth. But the gods didn't like it so they sent a killer planet to destroy it. The planet smacked into the Earth but their aim was off. Instead of destroying the Earth, it just knocked off a large piece of it. "We'll form that piece into a moon and hang it in Earth's sky as a warning," they said. And when they were done, they were satisfied. But there was some material left over from the Moon which they threw away; forever doomed to go around the Sun. Q: Could some of these near-Earth asteroids be left over from the Big Smack?
Don't stop where the ink does.
If the moon splits in half I totally want my own sun sword and some magic.
Thanks so much for the physics lesson. Really. I was wondering how much damage that asteroid would really do. And it would have been more seemly to close my comment with a question to that effect.
However, as you no doubt have by now already perhaps gleaned, my original comment was meant to be a sort of joke. Therefore, in my own defense, let me explain the comic processes involved.
A) Irony. There is intrinsic irony in mining an asteroid in order to spare the environment, but, in the process, actually destroying the environment; and, of course, along with it, the environmentalists. Ha ha ha. (As I am a conservationist and a practically-minded environmentalist I find this prospect darkly amusing.) The irony was meant to be advanced by another process; that is,
B) Hyperbole. From Wikipedia "Hyperboles are exaggerations to create emphasis or effect. As a literary device, hyperbole is often used in poetry [and humor]*, and is frequently encountered in casual speech. An example of hyperbole is: "The bag weighed a ton."[2] Hyperbole helps to make the point that the bag was very heavy, although it is not probable that it would actually weigh a ton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
So, no, I did not actually think that this relatively small NEO would lead to Armageddon. But that inaccuracy was a useful hyperbole to promote my ironic joke.
But I still maintain that even with a small delta-V an aircraft-carrier-sized rock would frag a lot of environmentalists; that is, if its man-made orbit deteriorated unpredictably and it landed on, say, Portland Oregon. (Doing so in defiance of all statistical laws, of course.)
*My italics.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
A few people observed a comet graze the atmosphere, apparently above the eastern Pacific Ocean, emitting deep green and brilliant orange sheets of light in the mid-1980's, long before anyone was interested in such close encounters. Because no one was interested, and no one cared - not the media, not astronomers, not the Air Force, and not even NASA, it was never reported and documented. The comet was later "discovered" the same year by an amateur astronomer while on it's outbound course from the sun and was identified by the observers as the same object they had seen.
The comet did not appear to move relative to the observers, which was fortunate - or you probably would never be reading this, and was close enough at that time to be seen with the naked eye and could be seen in great detail with 7x binoculars.
When NASA, etc., call such encounters as this current one a "close call", some people call "bullshit".
Nov 8 - Asteroid passes by...
Nov 9 1400 hrs PST - U.S. tests the National Emergency Broadcast System for the first time nation-wide. Previously only local activations and system tests were done (any other former broadcasters rememebr the "Red Envelope" prominently posted in the booth?).
Coincidence? I think not....
I did a search for "asteroid mining" at http://www.sti.nasa.gov/ and below are couple documents. I remember seeing in a 1979 STAR abstract journal documents titled "asteriod retrieval" but when I searched for that sti site I saw a lot of non-pertaining listings. Probably a bit too late to capture this month's flyby unless the USAF has a secret spacecraft ready to fly (yeah the old plot used in movies since the 1969 "Marooned").
Extraterrestrial materials processing and construction
Online Source: Click to View PDF File [PDF Size: 14.6 MB]
http://hdl.handle.net/2060/19790021033
Author: Criswell, D. R.
Abstract: Applications of available terrestrial skills to the gathering of lunar materials and the processing
Publication Year: 1978
Report/Patent Number: NASA-CR-158870, REPT-713-488-5200
Catastrophic Events and Mass Extinctions: Impacts and Beyond
Online Source: Click to View PDF File [PDF Size: 21.2 MB]
http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20010007049
Abstract: This volume contains extended abstracts that have been accepted for presentation at the conference
Publication Year: 2000
Report/Patent Number: LPI-Contrib-1053
mfwright@batnet.com
What would happen if it hit the MOON? A lot of shrapnel maybe.....
Jesus will continue protecting his people on earth even if the fully-funded governments sit on the ground at their annual Fall picnic putting down greasy fried chicken thinking absolutely NOTHING could go wrong with their calculations.
Outside Context Problem anyone?
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
You are *so* fucking tedious.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2506460&cid=37933028 so all the off topic illogical adhominem attacks in the world, per your dimwitted reply I just replied to, aren't helping you vs. documented facts in the URL link above where you are clearly outnumbered, and yes, by those with some "clout" & know how in the field of computer security (as well as your peers here on this website)...
APK
Ok, so I'm educating people. Luna is the Latin name for the Moon.
What about my DoomEd? DoomEd was okay, not the best but not the worst. I still think Doom Builder is the best Doom level editor out there. My Doom Builder is better than your DoomEd.
http://www.deepastronomy.com/apophis-asteroid-could-hit-earth.html
That's assuming we get past the Dec. 21st "blackhole alignment" w/ galactic center (which NOBODY KNOWS wtf THAT will do & "remains to be seen")...
APK
P.S.=> Man - the world's CRAZY ENOUGH lately (which scares me the most because it's fitting a LOT of the prophecies from Biblical revelations, The HOPI indians, The Mayan calendar end, Nostradamus, Mother Shipton & more over history), but, having to worry about getting "SMACKED" by a celestial body on top of the financial ruins out there lately, isn't helping...
... apk