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Asteroid Apophis Just Got Bigger
astroengine writes "As the potentially hazardous asteroid makes closest approach to Earth today, astronomers using the European Herschel Space Observatory have announced something a little unsettling: asteroid 99942 Apophis is actually bigger than we thought. Herschel astronomers have deduced that Apophis is 1,066 feet (325 meters) wide. That's 20 percent larger than the previous estimate of 885 feet (270 meters). 'The 20 percent increase in diameter, from 270 to 325 m, translates into a 75 percent increase in our estimates of the asteroid's volume or mass,' said Thomas Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and lead scientist of the study. In addition, the space telescope has re-analyzed the albedo of the space rock, providing a valuable heat map of the object's surface — data that will improve orbital trajectory models."
...does this mean we're more likely to die or less likely to die?
Someone had to say it.
Astronomers. My asteroid is bigger than your asteriod. Is not! Is too! Is not! Is too!.....I guess we'll both need grants for a few years to study the question.
Does this mean we need to prepare for a Goa'uld invasion?
SG-1 Will take care of it no doubt.
They're also saying that Apophis will pass within 36,000 km of Earth in 2029. Now that's not missing us by much.
Will my homeowners insurance cover any damage should this hit, or would it be considered "an act of God"?
Given it's named after an evil god, occultation is the appropriate way to measure it. Seriously, though, this is a very valuable tool that amateur astronomers use to make high-resolution measurements of asteroids as they pass in front of, or occult, stars.
asteroid 99942 Apophis is actually bigger than we thought
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzZ4i8aWs_s
--
BMO
Does that mean the hole has to be deeper than 800' for the nuclear weapon?
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
"In April 2029 the space rock will still make a very close pass with our planet, coming within 22,364 miles"
Being the skeptical engineer, I would say there is also a chance that on its multihundred million mile trip over the next decade and a half all it would take to nudge the orbit a slight amount to make the close pass a hit would be an encounter with another large object that affected its orbit ever so slightly...the wrong way.
That orbital perturbation is random & would simply not be predictable.
Now, I know that you've all seen the film Armageddon, with Bruce Willis - the problem there was even *trying* to splatter that asteroid with our entire nuclear arsenal was a "bad move", because it was HEADING OUR WAY/RIGHT AT US...
Ok - fine: I can understand that, since busting off pieces flying towards you would still have 'shrapnel' (that had enough kinetic energy to keep coming and hit you still, albeit in many more smaller fragments).
Now, from what I understand (& I've noted this particular asteroid here many times before during other 'scares' dealing in them, regarding the 2029 pass & 2036 potential collision especially): THIS THING IS PASSING BY US THIS ROUND, and, so close, IT IS BENEATH GEO-CENTRIC SATELLITE ORBITS!
That "all said & aside":
* PER MY SUBJECT-LINE ABOVE: "THE QUESTION":
Why the HELL don't they blow it up as it goes away from us?
This would avoid the problem per the film noted above, AND, it's NOT ALL THAT DAMN BIG TO BEGIN WITH, and the fragments (if any would be left IF we "did it right" meaning really knock the tar outta it & incinerate it IF possible, totally, leaving only dust!)
I mean, after all - We've got enough nukes in arsenals to rip the atmosphere clean off the planet for Pete's sake - do something "destructively constructive" with 'em instead, & polish this bastard asteroid off, once & for all!
APK
P.S.=> The ONLY 'problem' just *might* be creating tinier asteroids, but they would NOT BE HEADING IN OUR DIRECTION (@ least not right off) but they wouldn't be as damn large either!
Thoughts?
Thanks for your answers...
... apk
Well, obviously the asteroid had passed through the trans-fat and high-fructose corn syrup nebulae between photos.
No, it just means that the astronomers are using the telescope that doesn't have the mirror with the words "objects are closer than they appear" on it.
Well first of all, they successfully predicted it would be here now, so they must have done something right.
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
Now technically speaking the weight of the object does affect the rate at which other things fall towards it. (If you drop a 2kg weight the earth "falls" upwards twice as fast as if you drop a 1kg weight, but the difference is obviously too small to be measured.) So if Apophis encounters an object close to or smaller than its own mass it will make a difference. However i'm pretty sure they aren't able to predict encounters with objects that small, so if it does happen it will be a totally unexpected event with an unknown affect on its orbit anyways.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
So we used our super advanced technology to know precisely where this asteroid will be in like 2042 or whatever but we were off by almost half its mass (or volume)? Anyone see a little disconnect there? Especially since other solar system bodies' gravitational fields will affect it differently if it weighs double what we thought. I knew it was a load of alarmist, headline-grabbing BS.
So, re-read what you said and think about that. You'll come to the conclusion that you should be quite alarmed because we don't know what might hit us when. We also didn't know about Eris, a proto-planet more massive than Pluto until 2005. That means we're pretty damn blind, and that stuff we can see we can't see very well and thus can't make very precise predictions about them.
If anything, to me that means we should be pretty concerned about this situation and seek to rectify it ASAP. We need to swap the NASA and armed force's budgets. Get some space infrastructure in place to protect us from other asteroids: Get a few big rocks of our own orbiting to use as slingshots or gravity tugs, etc; Much better telescopes, esp. wide field systems; Self sustaining colonies off-world so all our eggs aren't in one basket. We can squabble about Oil after we're sure we're not going to be extinct.
The dinosaurs regarded chicken little as an Alarmist when she saw a meteor shower and said the sky was falling. Turns out she was right, only the dinosaurs in the flight program survived.
...those pills do work!
What's actually being done to prepare against an asteroid strike? Or are our government stooges just planning to throw every nuke we have at this thing?
IT's all NBC's fault and now comcast that messed up G4 owns them.
They got rid of there good thing they had on fridays and moved the show to mon going head to head with MNF and other big shows.
First people get fatter
Then the kilogram gains weight.
Now Apophis is bigger too.
Any speculations on what's next?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And you can see it debunked here: http://podcast.sjrdesign.net/shownotes_049.php
He made a vague prediction about a "red meteor" in 1981...mentioned no dates or size. Then in 2008 he spoke of it again, this time specifying dates and size.
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
True, but a higher mass relative to the diameter means that solar winds have a lesser effect. Granted, that effect is small compared to the pull of Earth, Sol, Jupiter and (when close) Luna, but it might still be significant in calculating whether we're going to get hit or not.
Given we have survived the last umpteen million years we can figure the odds are fairly low. Even for asteroids like this, it is not a planet killer. Of course humans are populating more areas in bigger numbers than we were say, a couple of thousand years ago, so anything hitting has higher odds of doing damage but the human race is fairly safe. No one knew about these until recently so knowing does make you nervous. At least they are making good progress.
And Eris is about the same size as Pluto. We couldn't see if because it was very very far away. We have found a bunch more now too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Neptunian_object#Notable_trans-Neptunian_objects
Not knowing about Eris doesn't mean there is likely to be a big planet on target to hit earth. If Eris was inside the orbit of Nepture it would have been discovered much quicker. Don't read those crazy panic websites without doing some reading of the mainstream sites to put it into perspective.
If it is within a few kilometres (=1000m) then he had a lot of wriggle room.
Apophis was a large evil Egyptian snake demon that opposed order, and wanted to eat the sun.
If the math is based on the old estimate then the projections for the future flybys will need to be revised. I don't know if they'll be closer or further away but massive is a major factor in how the asteroid will react to close passes with the Earth. 20% is a lot and the path will need revising. It's not a planet killer but it would make a mess of our current civilization depending on the type of impact.
You asteroid alarmists are getting ridiculous, there isn't a scientific consensus that asteroids even exist, let alone that they are caused by humans
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
I am a "mph" kind-of-guy, & haven't performed the conversion from kph->mph
Let me Google that for you.
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It was already that big. The only thing that happened was that it was measured better and turned out to be bigger than we previously thought.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Is not bigger, the rest of the universe got smaller.
So now the asteroid is estimated to be 325m not 270m across, it will be coming EVEN CLOSER at 35,999.945 km away? Eeek! run for the hills! we're dooomed Mr. Mainwaring!
the Higgs boson
I don't think you understand how explosions actually do their damage. An explosion in which the force is directed can be very powerful. A nuke in space is not a directed explosion, the energy flies out in all directions, most of them failing to be aimed at the asteroid. Also, notice that after the WWII nukes, there were buildings left standing. Admittedly, the ones we have now are bigger, but they don't atomize stuff very well. An a rock that big isn't going to be atomized very easily. Just to make it more complicated, we do not know the rock's composition. That greatly effects what a nuke will do to it.
Given what we do not know, it would be a real pisser if we hit it and caused it to impact the Earth.
The Mayans were right, it's our current calendar that got messed up by the catholic church. We're not really in 2013.
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Put the bomb on the asteroid when it is close, and use a timer? Probably need something with a little longer duration than a washing machine timer, but that shouldn't be the most complicated part of the plan.
Trajectories of an observed object in the solar system are comparatively project from observation, deducing mass can be trickier. So, no, I don't see a disconnect. You don't need to know its mass to know its trajectory (at least, at the level at issue, for an object of its scale given how close it passes to other objects in the solar system and their scale.)
Not much. Sure, it might make a difference to the effect of a very-close-pass to a similar-scale object, but compared to the main objects of interest that effect its orbit -- like the Earth and the Sun -- its mass is so small as to be pretty much irrelevant for most purposes in terms of figuring its trajectory.
Little do you realize that Apophis actually has a neutronium core and a near miss would sling the Earth out of its orbit. Ironically we should be hoping for a direct hit which, while devastating, would likely punch right through the planet and disrupt the Earths orbit far less, allowing for at least the hope of long-term survival :-P
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
indeed, it's not until the 2029 pass whether we'll know if it will hit the earth or not in 2036. the current probabilities are nonsense and mean nothing.
No, the current probabilities are not nonsense. They mean that, based on the currently understood orbit of Aphophis with the given error bars, it has a certain probability of passing through the "keyhole" and hitting earth on the next pass.
The belief that after 2029 we'll know if it will hit earth or not, either 0% or 100% chance, are based on the assumption that the error bars in measurement will at that time be small enough to definitively state if it will hit or not. Which is true, they will be, but is still based on exactly the same reasoning and math as probabilities calculated today.
That probability, by the way, is 0%. The other piece of news unmentioned in the headline is that in addition to new size observations, new orbital observations have decreased the error bars sufficiently that it can be said with confidence that Apophis will not pass through the keyhole and will not hit the earth in 2036.
The enemies of Democracy are
"PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., effectively have ruled out the possibility the asteroid Apophis will impact Earth during a close flyby in 2036. The scientists used updated information obtained by NASA-supported telescopes in 2011 and 2012, as well as new data from the time leading up to Apophis' distant Earth flyby yesterday (Jan. 9).
Discovered in 2004, the asteroid, which is the size of three-and-a-half football fields, gathered the immediate attention of space scientists and the media when initial calculations of its orbit indicated a 2.7 percent possibility of an Earth impact during a close flyby in 2029. Data discovered during a search of old astronomical images provided the additional information required to rule out the 2029 impact scenario, but a remote possibility of one in 2036 remained - until yesterday.
"With the new data provided by the Magdalena Ridge [New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology] and the Pan-STARRS [Univ. of Hawaii] optical observatories, along with very recent data provided by the Goldstone Solar System Radar, we have effectively ruled out the possibility of an Earth impact by Apophis in 2036," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL. "The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036. Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future."
The April 13, 2029, flyby of asteroid Apophis will be one for the record books. On that date, Apophis will become the closest flyby of an asteroid of its size when it comes no closer than 19, 400 miles (31,300 kilometers) above Earth's surface.
"But much sooner, a closer approach by a lesser-known asteroid is going to occur in the middle of next month when a 40-meter-sized asteroid, 2012 DA14, flies safely past Earth's surface at about 17,200 miles," said Yeomans. "With new telescopes coming online, the upgrade of existing telescopes and the continued refinement of our orbital determination process, there's never a dull moment working on near-Earth objects."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130110.html