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Asteroid Passes (Just) 65,000 Miles From Earth
An anonymous reader writes "Discovered a day before its closest approach to Earth, Asteroid 2013 LR6 came within roughly 65,000 miles of the planet as it flew over the Southern Ocean of Tasmania, Australia at 12:42 a.m. EDT on June 8. Despite being more than half the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, the 30-foot-wide asteroid posed no threat, according to NASA."
is useless for evaluating threats, which are on the other half of the arrow of time.
"as it flew over the Southern Ocean of Tasmania, Australia"
At 65,000 miles out, its not flying. (its in orbit around the sun)
And the southern ocean does not belong to Tasmania, or even Australia
Like the dinosaurs that came before us, we will claim the sky is not falling right up until it actually does.
Can we not fit a large laser to the ISS and have someone fly it around up there blasting it in to smaller manageable chunks (they would only need 2 rotation buttons, a thruster and a fire button). I am sure Atari patented this technology back in the 70's.
We almost got rid of Tasmania?
it posed no risk? Are there *really* people who think that a boulder so far away is actually a danger?
If so, sterilize them. Now!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Asteroid 2013 LR6 came within roughly 65,000 miles of the planet
This is exactly where you need to put some context on the numbers. I don't know offhand if that's come between earth and the moon (just looked it up - much closer to earth than the moon). Maybe everyone but me carries numbers like that around in their head but I don't and something like "about 1/4 the distance to the moon from earth" or "roughly twice as far as geostationary orbit" would have been really useful.
Thanks to progress in technologies, in telescopes (quality and price, China stuff ...) we have more and more asteroid news. Of course NASA needs to justify a budget, and any scary news is welcome. People are always glad to broadcast any news in regard to their new glass equipment. Thus, even an asteroid half the size of the one that illuminated the Russia sky a few weeks ago makes the headlines.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Much further and we would have been dealing with an integer overflow.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Slashdot doesn't do markup for anything. No accents for European languages (let alone more esoteric ones), no Unicode, no nothing.
It's 2013, and flat ASCII is all you get. On a blog that claims to be for techies by techies.
Weird thing is that the whole kaboodle is written in perl which supports Unicode right out of the box.
captcha: jackasses
Is it my imagination or are there more of these near-Earth rocks coming our way?
Or are they just being reported more? Or is the detection network more effective?
That is all.
That even if it hit earth it'd only send down some fragments that would only do damage if it actually hit you. (I mean they mention it was smaller than that Russian a little bit ago and that didn't really do much to the earth.) Actually here's a calculator that will let you put in some numbers. (Which pretty much agrees it'd only be a big deal if one of the fragments actually hit you directly.) http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The internet is purely a U.S. invention (al gore is sure of it). If the rest of the world wants to play with dirty french contrivances that have no usefulness except to move a decimal point, go ahead.
If you aren't using base 2, 8, or 12 in your daily life, you are probably not accomplishing anything except theoretical physics, that is to say, nothing.
This sort of thing seems to be happening more regularly. That could of course be a result of better science and math allowing us to track the asteroids more accurately.
I prefer to think that the Martians have decided there isn't any hope left for us.
Lets also not forget that space sciences use non metric units all the time. A light year and an AU are definately not metric and used all the time, but these metric loving hippies love to leave them out.
Another wonderful job by Slashdot's illiterate editing crew.
Despite being more than half the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, the 30-foot-wide asteroid posed no threat, according to NASA.
So despite being smaller than something that actually hit earth and did no significant damage, it posed no threat? Wow, that is sure surprising! Who writes this shit?
It's why they shoehorn in at least one Aussie-related story every day, even if it means completely distorting the facts in order to do so.
Serriously WTF, as a Kiwi (New Zealander) I know that the Southern Ocean is a fairly large body of water....Tasmaina happens to be in said ocean....."of" is really a bit of a stretch.
You say you *want* to remain on a single lump of rock?
HAHAHAHA!!!!
(translated from the Glertish)
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
How would wings work in space? I think you mean S-foils.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So much for early detection system