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Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040
dryriver writes with a report from CNN that the asteroid known as 2011 AG5 will not hit Earth in 2040 as early calculations had led some to fear when it was first spotted last year. "To narrow down the asteroid's future course, NASA put out a call for more observation. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days in October. 'An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated,' NASA declared Friday."
It has a diameter of about 140 meters. Its not a planet killer.
You watch too much TV. Nobody can keep a secret in this world. Not least of all, government officials.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It wouldn't matter. Time ends some time in 2038 when the 32 bit signed time value overflows.
You know how much government and private sector money you could had got if you tried to do a "white lie" like saying that it could hit, and even could be a planet killer? Everyone would want to have a working colony in mars or self-sustaining orbital colonies by 2020, if not before. It could had been a lie for the greater good.
Last post!
Yeah, it'd have a large local/regional impact, but not planet-wide. Estimates of the impact seem to hover around 100-150 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is 2-3 Tsar Bombas.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
theoretical physics, as little as I understand, leads me to believe by looking for them we are actively inviting them to hit us.
Its clear you understand little.
But I'd be interested in how one sends an invitation to a 140 meter ball of rock.
Will it RSVP?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
. . . only slightly used in 2012 . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
But maybe u think we could just hollywood like blow everything up and thats it?
In fact this is a realistic option with an asteroid this small. Its only 140 meters, or a football field and a half in diameter.
Shattering it into much smaller fragments is actually an option, as only some of those would still hit earth, and many of those would be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. Most that don't burn up, would (statically at least) hit ocean.
Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
By the way, how was the end of the world for you? Did you have a nice weather?
Yes, the weather was fine, about the same as here in the much hyped afterlife which, IMO, seems highly overrated.
Yes, people have calculated it. Depending on how far out you are, it can be enough to paint the asteroid white.
--
BMO
So just how long do we have to wait for this "doomsday" thing?
I'm going to have to spend Christmas catching up on two months' chores that I've been skipping.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Man, I'm barely two decades old and I've lived through dozens of predicted doomsdays. September 6, 1994 - the world did not end. July 1999 - the world did not end. All of the 2000 predictions, from apocalyptic Y2K bugs to Jerry Falwell, were wrong. Nibiru did not hit the Earth in 2003, probably because it doesn't exist. 6/6/2006 was unremarkable except for an abnormal number of heavy metal album releases. The Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the planet, although it did find the Higgs Boson. May 21 2011 was quiet. And the 14th b'ak'tun began with no real damage.
And those are just the ones I remember. According to Wikipedia, the "Mayan Apocalypse" was the 52nd doomsday prediction in the past two decades. And there are already five more specific predictions. There's a variant on a theory that predicted the Second Coming to occur in 1980, then 1988, then 2000, and now it's predicted for 2018-2028. Another nutjob is predicting the same for sometime in 2020-2037 (after his 1962 prediction failed). But don't worry, it's not just Christians making stupid predictions - a certain bit of the Talmud schedules the Messiah to arrive around 2240, and certain Muslims are claiming either 2129 or 2280 as the end date. And I am sure, given a few more years, the non-religious armageddon nutjobs will catch up - perhaps they'll twist the 2038 Problem into an apocalypse prediction, just like they did to Y2K.
5km isn't enough to "significantly slow down (and disperse)" such a large volume of material. The impact area is still too localised, even though the object is shattered. More than that, the range of conventional "high velocity" firearms isn't enough to reach the asteroid at 5km. And even if it was, your 1 million shooters would all have to be directly under the "dispersal" zone. They'd be vaporised.
If you could shatter it fine enough at a sufficient distance - multiple Earth-moon distances - so that the spread was at least planet-wide, you might reduce any local damage to tolerable levels. You still get all the energy dumped into the atmosphere, but in this case, that's not enough to worry about compared to the effect of a single impact site.
Most asteroids seem to be pre-shattered anyway. Loosely held piles of smashed rock, gravel and dust. Unless you can cause it to spread significantly apart, breaking it up isn't doing much to change its nature, it will still impact would the same force it would have anyway. It will also be able to take a massive amount of damage without breaking apart, by shifting internally to absorb the energy. Compare the impact of smashing a wrecking ball into a solid boulder, verses dropping it on a pile of sand and gravel.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
No you clearly didn't. I explained how the two are not comparable. Twice. This is attempt three.
An object on a collision course with Earth may require only the slightest nudge to send it off-course enough to miss, a few tens of metres per second. Small amount of force.
But if you want to target something into Earth (or into a Lagrange capture), you are not starting with an asteroid that is in a convenient orbit that is just a few tens of metres per second away from a perfect intercept. Instead you will have to deal with whatever orbit it's in, and looking at actual asteroids, that typically requires several kilometres per second in order to move it into an intercept orbit. (Plus a second burn of about half a km/s if you want to capture it into orbit, in order to circularise apogee.) Large amount of force.
Several kilometres per second is not the same as a few tens of metres per second.
Do you understand? Whether you are using a change of albedo, a rocket, or wishful thinking. Kilometres are bigger than metres. They Are Not The Same.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.