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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."
"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?
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.
To be fair, the object that hit Chicxulub posed no risk for any of it's near Earth passes either.... until it did.
While this object is fairly small, it passed about 1/4 of the distance to the moon from us. If we were intelligent, we'll keep track of it so we can plot to see if it will ever hit us; if we blindly think it poses no risk, it may slap us in the face in the future.
As for NASA stating that it posed no risk in passing us that close, i can both understand the humor in their statement, as well as them feeling the need to after the complete and utter bullshit hysteria that anything more than a gnat farting 10 miles away causes in some of the truly idiotic of our species (see: all the lame ass, end of the world bullshit ever contrived by mental midgets, or the con-men taking advantage of the mental midgets).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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 does not support the degree symbol, but it does have some of the accented characters used in Western Europe (ä à á å â ç ñ ø € etc.). It also supports some less common characters, such as the Icelandic ð or the æ or ß ligatures.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
is how we gather statistics from the past to generate probabilities for predicting the future. The More You Know.
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?
I don't care about unicode. I was referring to the html markup for degree "°".
It's html, it should display on a web page without any assistance. The comment-clenser allows many others to pass through (like &, which is how I wrote the above.) But for some reason it blocks so many harmless character codes.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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.
Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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.
You missed é, which is perhaps more commonly used than the others you cite...
But otherwise, yeah, pretty lame for a nerdy site.
Very deep. You know they have a page on Reader's Digest for people like you.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
That's a direct quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you nitwit.
Another wonderful job by Slashdot's illiterate editing crew.
ASCII has a near-perfect support for English. Why does lack of Unicode support bother you? Does it hinder you from posting in other languages? In that case /. does an excellent job at filtering out (certain class of) trolls, and that takes precedence over whatever minor inconvinience it poses.
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?
That's kinda why they track these things... to find out if it does. One day of tracking isn't usually enough to know it's orbit well enough to tell.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There's a lot of variable to the equation, and yes, size is one of them. On smaller objects, it's not necessarily the most important; a 30m rock pile wouldn't even hit ground, a 30m iron, high speed, steep entrance... it's going to make a very nasty dent in whatever it hits...a car, a backyard, a city...
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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!
Yes, indeed they do. Why? Because so few people have the brains and imagination to conceive of distance beyond the next block. In astronomical terms, 65,000 miles is almost grazing, hence a near miss. To a human on earth, it's a long way away.
An astronomical-skin-of-the-teeth miss is still... a miss.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yes... but explain that to the average american't bozo who thinks that it's ok for schools to include theology in science classes.
Is that you, Ford?
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Author. Ford was the fellow who said the lunch time is an illusion thing.
A: What, three pints at lunch time? ... ...
F: Time is an illusion
A: Very deep.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
And I fucked up didn't I. s/Author/Arthur/
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
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."
Yeah, I realised that about 0.00000001 seconds after I hit submit - ah well :-)
Stay hoopy, frood.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.