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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."
Would any of that thing even reach the ground before burning out during atmospheric entry?
I don't see how that applies to this.
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.
Not this time, the article says it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit. Even if it does impact intact, the worst the damage could be would be comparable to the Tunguska event.
Depending on location, it could be very bad, but not an extinction event. You are right though, if it was bigger, we would be screwed. Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
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?
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
Don't know if trolling It's about energy – you would need a big pebble to do any damage if you were to throw it by hand, but accelerate it and it does some damage. A bullet is smaller than a pebble
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.
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.
Since when is a rocket with a nuke more expensive than the global civilization that we have?
Ezekiel 23:20
Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
But how about Juan Carlos?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
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!
Looks like someone skipped class that day the high school physics teacher went over kinetic energy.
Trouble is, a single rocket with a single nuke isn't likely enough to fix a civilization-destroying rock.
Also, given the choice between practically any expenditure and world civilization, of course it's worthwhile. But by the time we get that choice, it's too late to do anything. At the moment, it's something like "building and maintaining a rocket with a nuke" for "1 in a million annual risk to global civilization".-- you can't just say that such a rock is eventually inevitable, because asteroid defense isn't something you buy once and put on the shelf in addition to the upkeep and periodic replacement of weapons, there's the cost of a concerted monitoring program to detect a threat early enough and with an accurate enough orbital solution that the gentle tap of a nuke will eliminate the risk.
It's not easy to come up with actual numbers, but once you factor in the possibility (IMO likelihood) that civilization may well end long before such an impact, it would not be entirely surprising to find that it's actually economically saner to hope for the best than to make preparations.
(It's analogous to a civilian in low-crime areas considering the purchasing and wearing Type III body armor -- the cost, discomfort, and hassle of wearing it for a day is certainly less expensive than dying from a rifle shot, but the odds of ever encountering such a situation are so low it's not worthwhile.)
Asteroid Will Make Close Pass To Earth != "the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero"
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I suspect you like watching things blow up, but that's not really the wisest choice here. Much better would be an impactor with very high mass - perhaps a depleted uranium core - and low relative velocity: slow enough to contact the asteroid without shattering it and massive enough to nudge its trajectory and keep nudging it for a while. Post-contact booster rockets might help further. It's not something you launch in the eleventh hour, though.
Sounds like not enough for me to care.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
It doesn't just need to be a rocket, it needs to be a really big rocket. To deflect something potentially civilisation-destroying, you want to do it as early as possible. Inside lunar orbit is much too late. That means that you need to get a rocket out to it, and then match velocities (just ramming it won't be enough) and deliver the explosive to a sensible location. Ideally, you want to attach to the side and push it, rather than try to blow it up. We're talking something that would make the Apollo rockets look small...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
even though we're about 26,000 mi in diameter
Who are *we* ?
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.
Provided the asteroid's mass is much smaller than the Earth's--which it is, unless it's made of neutronium--then its deflection does not significantly depend on its mass.
No, we're nowhere near 26k miles in diameter. Not even obese Americans.
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.
Yeah, everyone knows a tiny piece of metal can't do any damage no matter how fast it's moving...
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...
I think a future victim could make an excellent case for debating on "point" the cost effectiveness for Asteroid Deterrent Defense.
Its been awhile, but I thought there was a game where one could discover the requirements for moving an Asteroid.
not true, if you remember the Monty Python show "Is there Life After Death", with guests of several prestigious dead peope, there was un-aired segment of cost-benefit analysis questions asked of the dead, and it turns out dead people do not make convincing cost effectiveness arguments at all.
nonsense, the chance of a civilization-destorying rock landing within the time span we are recognizably human is so very close to zero it is of no import.
The last 6 mile diameter/civilization-destroying-sized thing was 65 million years ago. we won't be human in 65 million years, we could as well be animal or rodent by that time. Clearly we should spend $0 on the problem. As for city-destroying-sized things, odds are any will just land in uninhabited area. If a city does get hit, well, sucks to be them.
which killed how many people, exactly? the next thing of that size will also very, very, very likely strike where no one lives
it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit
With a bit of luck it will clean out a few dead satellites on the way
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
But the Earth is much larger than a bowling pin. I'd say that passing passing within a few Earth radii is of us is a fair definition of a near miss.
If it hit the ocean anywhere near land, it would still cause significant devastation. In "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a much larger object struck the Pacific Ocean - IIRC a mile in diameter. At 30,000 MPH relative, about 8.3 miles per second, that large object went through the depth of the Pacific in something less than one second, vaporizing cubic miles of water and causing a tsunami a couple thousand feet high, striking LA and washing over the mountains into the Central Valley. This one is a tiny fraction of that one, but I suspect (without doing any math) that if it hit within a few miles of a coastline it might easily displace a volume of water equivalent to the crater it would generate on land, thereby causing a significant tsunami, and it would vaporize enough to change the weather for a year or two.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Anything that massive would suck all countries GDP for the next 100 years to get into orbit.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
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
[...] causing a tsunami a couple thousand feet high, striking LA and washing over the mountains into the Central Valley.
LA could use a good hosing down.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Isn't that sometimes you roll a 20 on your confirm roll?
@Random_Adam
Sometimes a sig doesn't have to be funny!!
Touching/Landing on asteroids is difficult because they have very complicated structures and rotations. The best way to deflect an asteroid is not by nukes or what you suggest, but by spraying it white (solar radiation pressure) or parking a mass (e.g. 1t) with a ion drive next to it.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-deflect-asteroid.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid-impact_avoidance#Collision_avoidance_strategies
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Since the elite only need about 8% max of the population? lets face it the thing nobody wants to mention is for the first time in history technology has pretty much made most peasants completely worthless. With robots and automation you can have entire factories run by just a couple of low skilled button pushers and even in the tech sector you are seeing the rise of smart servers and other gear that simply tells some monkey when to replace a failing part so the billions of peasants you have now simply are no longer required. When your average IQ is 101 and the jobs that can provide more than a "living on a couch" wage require a 140 IQ you are playing a game of musical chairs with more and more unable to find a seat.
Hell I'd argue a good 30%-40% of the jobs in the USA are "make work" that if it weren't for government subsidies wouldn't exist. Take Walmart and McDonald's for examples, Walmart gives a training video on how to apply for food stamps because without government subsidies nobody could live on what they pay. Don't think that if forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't replace many of them with machines? Self checkouts and robotic stockers could get rid of a bunch of them. And what about fast food? Do you think that those jobs couldn't be trivially done by an automated assembly line? Not exactly hard to imagine simply pressing a few buttons on a screen and having an assembly line "build" the order and drop it out a slot.
So as long as they had a nice well stocked hole to hide in I could see a plague or asteroid being very useful for the elite, it would "thin the herd" so to speak. We have 7 billion plus and with automation you could probably do just as well with less than a billion total, the peasants simply aren't needed for their labor anymore and are simply a drain upon the system.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In my defense I mentioned your second choice. I don't think I'd want the job for the first one... Bruce Willis as an industrial painter in a space suit?
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
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!
I suspect you like watching things blow up
I do, but that's not the point. If it has any chance to cause global extinction due to its size, you can't make it explode with a nuke of a reasonable size. You can, however, nudge it with the explosion. Perhaps a contact explosion is not desirable, but you should still be able to press on an area of tens of thousands of square meters for a few seconds with a pressure sufficient to outmatch that heavy slow impactor. True, the lack of atmosphere doesn't help here, but perhaps some additional inert mass around the nuke could help with it. (You need both some mass to form a temporary hot gas cloud and the energy to feed it.) I wonder if anyone has actually considered this option.
Ezekiel 23:20
Trouble is, a single rocket with a single nuke isn't likely enough to fix a civilization-destroying rock.
Any particular reason why it should be that way?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Your mom. Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
In the truth TPTB/PHB haven't considered any options. They'll delay and deny and in the end attempt solutions that consider only their own little close circle and to hell with the rest of us.
You used the word contact, and I mean "next to it" in the sense that they are not in contact (gravitational pull only). But I think we just need to try it on some test asteroid -- e.g. to bring it into an orbit around the earth.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I'd volunteer. Appropriate industrial experience ; plenty of remote site operations experience ; no undue concerns about radiation.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"