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Asteroid Will Make Close Pass To Earth
The Bad Astronomer writes "News is starting to spread about a small 45-meter-wide asteroid called 2012 DA14 that will make a close pass to Earth on February 15, 2013. However, some of these articles are claiming it has 'a good chance' of impacting the Earth. This is simply incorrect; the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero. Farther in the future the odds are unclear; another near pass may occur in 2020, but right now the uncertainties in the asteroid's orbit are too large to know much about that. More observations of DA14 are being made, and we should have better information about future encounters soon."
Humanity has had it's chance in expanding outside of this little rock, and we blew it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Would any of that thing even reach the ground before burning out during atmospheric entry?
Seeing more and more reports of near passes. Frigging Bugs must be out of target practice and are homing in on us! Get NPH!
The world ends toward the end of this year, duh! Of course the chance of hitting the Earth is 0%, because we won't be here!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
The odds of any individual item hitting us are (pardon me) astoromically small. Even if it did have a "good chance" of hitting us, that would mean maybe 1% at this point. Obviosly rocks have hit earth before, and rocks will hit earth again, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
TFA contains a link to an predicted impact table of DA14 with earth, going some 50 years into the future. The likelihood of each impact is rather small, and the cumulative probability of any impact is computed as 2.2e-04 (about 1 in 5000 - not alarming, but not exactly negligible IMO).
Here's what I don't understand: the first entry in the chart, corresponding to the next risk event, is in the year 2020. What happened to Feb 2013?
The linked article talks briefly about a possible next close pass in 2020. I thought that I only understood a tiny bit of astrophysics. Now, I guess I don't understand any of it at all. I would have thought that since we don't know the mass exactly and we don't know exactly how close it will come, we also wouldn't know how much its orbit would be changed by its close encounter with Earth. I'd think that coming in below some satellite's orbits would mean the deflection would be very large and there would no longer be an "orbit similar to Earth's". It would have its trajectory changed by so much that it would be "flung out" or at least begin a completely new orbit. However that would mean we have no real idea where it would be in 8 more years. So, I fail at astrophysics...
Whether the asteroid has a "good chance" of hitting the earth depends on how you define "good chance," which does not have an accepted standard definition.
Oh no! A 45 meter space rock might hit us, and it might mean the end of the world, even though we're about 26,000 mi in diameter and it will probably burn up in the atmosphere! And of course, we all know when someone throws a pebble at a person, that person EXPLODES! WE ARE ALL DOOM-ED!
What's up with all of these close passes? Hey universe! Grow some nuts and actually hit us with one, you pussy!
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
But it isn't. The chance of anything important being hit is almost nil, while defending from asteroids is extremely expensive. It just isn't cost-effective.
Just look at our wars on "Terror" and "Drugs". Do you honestly think cost effectiveness is ever considered?
Now defending from asteroids won't be politically feasible until we actually get hit by one - when people can actually see it and experience the impact, death and destruction. Some millions of years old crater in a desert is nothing.
Asteroid Will Make Close Pass To Earth != "the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero"
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Astroid 60m passing at 27000000 meters is called close...
But it is like playing 10 pin bowling on a lane in San Francisco and roll the ball down the street in Santa Clara (87 km away) and call that a near miss. Forgive me for not getting too worried about this one. Give me a call when it is close enough that I need to duck.
Sounds like not enough for me to care.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
NASA places the odds at 99.9988% chance of a miss. That is almost, but not quite, 5-nines. With all the downtime I've seen from companies promising 5-nines of reliability and failing, I'm more than a little skeptical.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The number of asteroids passing close to the Earth has not changed recently, but the number we know about has increased dramatically. The current statistics are around 8700 known NEO's, which is double what we knew about 5.5 years ago, 4 times that of 9.5 years ago, and 10 times that of 12.5 years ago. Therefore the number of *known* close passes will continue to go up.
In the silver lining department, the more NEO's we know about, the more chances for space mining, and the better chance we have of preventing dangerous ones from hitting us or the Moon. Lunar impacts are often neglected, but more mass can be tossed off the Moon, because it's smaller, to end up sucked into the giant gravity well nearby called Earth. You get just as dead being hit by a 1 ton Lunar fragment as by a megaton asteroid, but the deaths are more distributed in time and space.
I'm sure someone (not me) will re-analyze the Mayan calendar and show that it's a couple months off..and Mayan doomsday is actually scheduled for 15 Feb 2013.
BTW, the location of the Chicxulub crater is at the northern edge of Maya-land, although the only Mayans around then were dinosaurs.
45m would be roughly comparable to Tunguska. It could completely fuck up a large metropolitan area, but only with a direct hit on land. Otherwise all you get is a sizeable earthquake and possibly a tsunami, which sucks, but is nothing we haven't seen several times in the last decade.
The point is that it would be a big explosion, but even at its most devastating it wouldn't come close to an extinction event.
The risk, for this asteroid as has been pointed out before is negligible. Anyone who follows http://www.spaceweather.com/ knows 2 or 3 times a year some small piece of rock comes between the earth and moon. Furthermore a few 10 MT nukes can easily either vaporize or at the very least break up into many small pieced a 150 foot chunk of rock. The technology to deliver such a device millions of miles out has been already proven by the recent asteroid and comet intercept probes. A single MIRV, attached to an appropriate launch vehicle could easily put from 10 to 30 nukes each containing half a megaton or more into the path of something like this. My guess is that you could create the launch vehicle for something like this in a year or so if the incentive were appropriate enough.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Its been awhile, but I thought there was a game where one could discover the requirements for moving an Asteroid.
"the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero." Until someone discovers it was in imperial and not metric.
I'm soo tired of waiting for global calamity.
If the estimations in TFA are correct, then it should pass earth at an altitude of 2792.7005070920594418000000 kilometers. Thats not close. Thats a hike from Earth's gravity well. Its a hike from Earth's atmosphere. Its not close.
Are you kidding me? The MOON is almost 400,000 km away. A massive, dangerous object passing within 3,000 km isn't "close"? To a planet that's 13,000 km in diameter? This asteroid will be within SPITTING distance of Earth.
...I was wrong when I once said that all the crazy people should be let out of the hospitals and let to run the governments of the US. Nope, it is now very clear that the crazy people should be kept locked up, and furthermore should not be allowed to read the news or anything above their education levels. I mean...I really think that "Interpretation 101" should be elected as a required course, starting in elementary school. Because it is again, very clear, that people should not be allowed to interpret anything that they are not qualified to do.
Keywords for the NSA overthrow oppressive regime true believers marathon Manhatten the financial district blueprints I
Attention all non-scientists:
Watching the movie Armageddon does NOT make you a fucking expert in the subject of Near-Earth Asteroids. Like the newer article on the site has indicated, you know nothing about the subject and are incapable of even recognizing those who do.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Why can't anyone see this? http://starshiptroopers.wikia.com/wiki/Meteor_Attack_on_Buenos_Aires
What's the potential effect of a meteor hitting the moon instead? What would the mass need to be to have a measurable effect on the moon's orbit over a 10 year period? Seems like the subsequent weather pattern changes could be worse than an Earth impact.
DA-14 named Apophis http://asteroidapophis.com/year-2013/ And it is expected to potentially hit in 2036. Emphasis on potentially.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Put it into orbit. *THEN* we'd have something, in terms of material, to build a *real* space station, with enough protection from radiation as well.
mark
on the premise that we have accurately predicted a large asteroid impact on Earth in a decade from now. Film follows the effect this has on people all over the world, from the time of the announcement to the impact itself. From those who don't believe, to those who look forward to it or see it as the holy Armageddon they've been waiting for. The scary thing is many Christians do look forward to that!
Would make an interesting film I think.
in the one article it lists a link to http://newton.dm.unipi.it/neodys/index.php?pc=1.1.8&n=2012DA14 My question is on that chart at the year 2077/02/16.12110 it has Min possible distance of all zeros. does it mean at that time it could hit us?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune