Slashdot Mirror
ATLAS Meteor Tracking System Gets $5M NASA Funding
An anonymous reader writes "After a huge meteor recently exploded over Chelyabinsk (population 1,130,132), Russia, NASA has approved $5 million for funding for ATLAS project (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System). From the article: '"There are excellent ongoing surveys for asteroids that are capable of seeing such a rock with one to two days' warning, but they do not cover the whole sky each night, so there's a good chance that any given rock can slip by them for days to weeks. This one obviously did," astronomer John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii told NBC News Friday.'"
They applied for a grant in 2011 and it was approved then. This summary implies that NASA has been scrambling this weekend to fund something in the wake of the Russian meteor explosion. The project has been in the works for YEARS.
http://www.fallingstar.com/nasa_funding.php
The ATLAS system's funding is a step in the right direction but as the article mentions the southern pole would remain a blind spot. Still, having one to two day's notice for an affected area would go a long way. We seem to have most of the >150m asteroids located through current efforts but that still leaves thousands or millions of undetected objects capable of wiping out a city and causing further catastrophe for nuclear facilities. The cost vs. benefit seems evident, better late than never.
Since when does NASA have money?
Maybe they dedicated some cores to bitcoin mining? (I mean, if the congress approval is unreliable, they'd need to find other ways to survive)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Well yeah its kinetic energy was huge. If it was one metre across and hit at 100km/s that would be huge too.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
no alerts are deemed necessary?
5 million seems a bit like peanut change for something like this, I can't imagin that it will go far.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Really? Wouldn't it just heat up and explode sooner, higher up in the atmosphere?
"Pardon me sir, but it's a BIG ASS sky"!
The sad fact of meteor discovery, is that there is a threshold on size that we will not be able to identify. We knew the 150ft meteor, DA14, was going to pass within 17K+ miles of Earth because of a previous swing. The meteor that came in over Russia came out of no where. At 7000 tons, it was a pretty damn small object considering the damage it caused.
There's no easy answer solution to the 'meteor problem'. Would scanning spherically, at Lagrange points make a difference? No doubt more money will have 'some' impact, but this is a probing measure only. It does nothing in the event that we find one on an impact trajectory. I guess, one thing at a time, right?
I'm sorry, are your statements by chance a euphemism for something?
OK, first off, tracking such objects is a useful exercise, for many reasons, not just for the OMG, WE'RE GONNA GET HIT, crowd.
Unfortunately, it's practically useless for the purpose it's being touted for. That is, to give short notice warning of an impending impact.
Firstly, given the design criteria, we're looking at 48 hours notice, maximum, before an impact. Note that at the outer edge of this prediction envelope, it's a predicted impact - that is, one with a significant change of impact, but not a certainty of one. Now, hopefully, people would take this as seriously as we now do Tsunami Warnings. But think about it one more step:
Secondly, the impact area simply can't be computed until relatively shortly before impact. That is, if we detect the incoming meteor 48 hours ahead of time, it will take a couple of hours to compute a rough impact zone (meaning, just which part of the GLOBE it will hit), and likely you won't have a decent small error probability zone (meaning, something less than 100 miles across) until 12 hours or less before impact.
Does anyone think that a 12 hour warning of an impact can have any actual damage mitigation effect? Sure, if the area being hit has (a) a relatively low population, AND (b) a very good transportation system. But virtually all places on the Earth fail at one of those. There's simply no way to effectively evacuate even a mid-size city in time, and it's not like you can put everyone into blast shelters like the old Nuclear War scenarios wanted us to do.
So, spend the money on ATLAS, and get ourselves some great astrometric data for future use. It just won't be any sort of useful in terms of damage avoidance.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
The Department of Energy is the one with the extra cycles.
NASA's Pleiades is 14th in top500 (at the level of Oct 2012)... I guess it still qualifies to "plenty of computation power".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
At very high rates of speed, which 100km/sec would be a flat out damn fast as the normal/average speed is more in the line of 12-20km/sec, it would be possible for it to simply punch a hole through the atmosphere without ever ablating anything.... think of it as a bow shock, if you will. There's a number of variables though... composition (iron a better choice than stony), and entry angle (steep entry more likely), but it's possible. That would definitely make a dent in anything it landed on.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I would have suggested they mine the asteroid.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
This doesn't exactly fit the topic, but I don't know of a good place to even ask this question. At one time the official advice was to open windows during a tornado, so that pressure inside the building could equalize with the atmosphere, thus reducing destruction. I think that advice has been thrown out, because if a tornado does hit your house it's toast, and at least having your windows closed gives a little protection from flying debris and hail.
However, the opening windows advice does sound good for massive shock waves, like from a meteor. If you'll notice in the videos showing windows in apartment buildings blowing out, it was pretty evenly distributed across the building. It might have affected 1 in 5 windows or so, which to me appears to have been the necessary amount to equalize pressure in the building. My point is if if that number of windows had been opened on purpose, then I bet none would have had to have blown out.
Anyone know anything specific about this kind of thing?
Better known as 318230.
.. is that the more damage done by near earth objects, the more we'll spend trying to save ourselves from them.
Is it just me or does that seem like the wrong way of approaching this issue?
Since when does NASA have money?
Maybe they dedicated some cores to bitcoin mining? (I mean, if the congress approval is unreliable, they'd need to find other ways to survive)
Its a shame though. NASA would be beside themselves if they got 10Bil a year. Meanwhile, the US Army spends 20bil a year on air conditioning alone...
A right shame. You would think with all the inventions and innovations that have come out of NASA throughout its history, Americans would be proud of what they have with NASA. Instead they seem to see it as a pointless financial burden.
Even at a steep entry angle it would be in the atmosphere for 2 seconds before impact.
A 15m shpere has around 3000x the volume of a 1m one. You'd need the 1m diameter one to go over 50x faster to equal the kinetic energy of the 15m diameter one. Say over 500km/sec.
I think you wanted to respond to MichaelSmith. I was responding to your question on whether it would simple explode in the atmosphere or not. I think it was Dyson that first suggested that not terribly large object entering the atmosphere at a very high rate of speed could actually impact the oceans floor without even touching water due to bowshock. (my caveat: it's been over 35 years since i read much on the subject, and my memory is not remotely close to what it was then. It may have been someone else's writings that were published at that time, and somehow got attributed to Dyson in my grey matter.)
As for your point: yes, volume increases isn't linear with size, and volume decrease would necessitate a significant increase in velocity to compensate. There's a lot of variables to take into account other than simply size and speed in the overall picture, though. Actual damage would also change depending on the terrain, height of the air burst, and impact or air burst. I think MichealSmith's point isn't a strict comparison of exactly the same amount of energy released, but more along the lines of "it doesn't have to be big size wise to cause a lot of damage."
This one in Russia would have caused significantly more damage had the burst been lower in the atmosphere, or in a more populated area, where one larger than this would have caused little to no damage somewhere out in the middle of the ocean.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There ya go! Perfect reason to bring the shuttle fleet out of mothballs and tricked out with cinematic, ostentacious, techno-bling. Except this time, Willy's young hot-headed buddy Ben Affleck is actually going along totally undercover in order to exfiltrate Sidney Bristow, the spy hottie with whom he has been two-timing Willy's half-elven daughter, Arwen.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I have a feeling NORAD knew about that meteoroid before the Russians saw it become a meteor and finally plunged into the lake and turned into a meteorite. I would also go so far as to say the Russian Military saw it coming in as well. The cold war may be "over", but both nations are nervous about North Korean and Iran and I would gather that they have been and will continue to closely monitor their own airspace for quite some time.
If you're a dinosaur, yes! :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org