Newly Discovered Asteroid To Pass Within Geostationary Orbit Sunday

theshowmecanuck writes: A newly found asteroid the size of a house will give earth a close flyby this weekend. It will pass just below satellites in geostationary orbit, and above New Zealand around 14:18 EDT / 18:18 GMT / 06:18 NZST this coming Sunday (Monday morning in NZ). "Asteroid 2014 RC was initially discovered on the night of August 31 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, and independently detected the next night by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, located on the summit of Haleakal on Maui, Hawaii," NASA officials said in a statement.

Comments

Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the 34,000 km above earth part, but the "we discovered it a week ago" part.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[i kan reed]

An asteroid the size of a house would have to be going extraordinarily fast to pose much of a threat to the planet as a whole.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[i kan reed]

I'll worry about more likely concerns for local-scale damage.

Like say, a tornado. Today. That's more likely than a house sized asteroid hitting anywhere in my region in my lifetime.

Asteroids are primarily a concern due to the civilization terminating potential. And intrasystem asteroids the size of houses don't pose that threat.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[felixrising]

Meh, don't worry about it, I'm sure some other Country is spending money tracking NEOs.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[Charliemopps]

An asteroid the size of a house would have to be going extraordinarily fast to pose much of a threat to the planet as a whole.

It's about the same size as the Chelyanbinsk meteor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Which hit the earth with the force of about 500kilitons of TNT
Here's some video footage in case you're not terrified yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

From what I'm reading, this asteroid is going even faster, but it's hard to tell how fast it will be going if it actually hit us.

Re: Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[i kan reed]

Let's put it this way: I'm more worried about being hit by a car than a crashing plane. Even though crashing planes are big, and dramatic and caused 9/11.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[RivenAleem]

Who's house we taking about here?

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[i kan reed]

Yes, apparently, we do. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30k mph. That's a reasonable amount lower than the Chelyabinsk event, given that energy is proportional to velocity squared.

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[Lost Penguin]

Wait till it starts transmitting a greeting..... /"Attention all planets of the solar federation".

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[i kan reed]

This is a question that can only really be answered with "take physics 101"

Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close

[Anonymous Coward]

Your estimates of the impact are way off for the scale of this rock, which is only 15-25 m in diameter. Even if it was quite dense rock and managed to hit at 90 degrees, it would still mostly break up in the air and you would get a spray of fragments over a couple hundred meters not strong enough to create any large crater. Even the 90 degree case in both shallow and deep water will not create tsunami more than a meter high.

The total kinetic energy of the thing in space is a couple of megatons, a lot of which is lost upon hitting the atmosphere before even breaking up. You're not going to get devastation orders of magnitude larger than a large nuclear weapon under worst case scenario. And if it comes in at something less than a 90 degree angle, you could end up with something like the Chelyabinsk meteor, since this is nearly the same size and a bit faster.

Can we see it?

[Jonifico]

Will it be visible by the naked eye?

Re:Can we see it?

[geogob]

You can expect a magnitude of +11.5 according to some sources. So no, definitely not visible to the naked eye. Should be easy with a good motorised telescope.

3:2 resonance

[Geoffrey.landis]

What I find cool about this asteroid is that it's in a 1.5 year orbit. That means it's in a 3:2 resonance with Earth. So it'll come by again if you miss it this time, every 3 years.

Normally you'd expect asteroids that makes this close an approach to Earth to have a bit of a change in orbital parameters after the flyby, but that 3:2 orbital ratio is unlikely to be a coincidence-- it looks like a resonant orbit, in which the Earth's gravitational perturbation has already modified the orbit until it reached that stable resonance.

The small-body page allows you to propagate the orbit into the future, if you're interested. (Not a good tool to use if you're calculating missions, though-- you'll want a more accurate simulator! The V_infinity is a bit large for a rendezvous, though.)

Re:3:2 resonance

[Minupla]

you'll want a more accurate simulator!

Quick! Load Kerbal Space Program!

Re:3:2 resonance

[TheCarp]

Already done, a quick simulation clearly shows nothing to worry about, even if it hit the atmosphere straight on it would still be decelerated to a safe velocity before hit hit the gorund and would just bounce.

That is a load off my mind.

Distance discrepency

[geogob]

All other source I've seen mention 0.0002664... AU or approx. 40'000 km. That would be above geosynchronous orbit altitude, not below.

For example, from JPL:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c...

Re:Distance discrepency

[vic.tz]

From TFA

At its close approach, the 60-foot (20 meters) asteroid will fly about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) from the center of Earth. The average radius of the Earth (the distance from the center of the planet to its surface) is about 3,959 miles (6,371 km).

Geostationary orbit is ~42,164 km from the center of Earth, so TFS is correct based on this info.

Geostationary Orbit Sunday already?

[wonkey_monkey]

Geostationary Orbit Sunday

I've only just recovered from Near Equatorial Tuesday!

Misleading

[rossdee]

"It will pass just below satellites in geostationary orbit, and above New Zealand "

Geostationary orbit is around the equator, NZ is 40 to 45 degrees south or so.

Re:Quick, capture it

[CeasedCaring]

Space.com says it's a 60-footer. http://www.space.com/27026-ast...

RC

[Chas]

For "really close"

And the next one will be the size of Texas

[HangingChad]

All our hopes and dreams revolving around deflecting asteroids and comets all hinge on being able to detect them far enough out to make an intercept. Makes me think we should really reconsider the priority we put on manned space missions, particularly generational missions. Otherwise we stand a good chance of getting snuffed out as a species if we hang around here long enough. Asteroids and comets are not even the most dangerous threats we face.

Re:Soulskill is a wee-todd. Title written by moron

[ihtoit]

to answer GP (who I assume is an AC): geostationary is by no means arbitrary.

A geostationary orbit is one in which the orbiting body does not move relative to a point on the surface of its parent (in the context case, specifically Earth). This requires a specific orbital distance (22,236 miles*) at a specific inclination (0 to the equator), to maintain a sidereal orbital period of 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds (approximately). which is equal to the sidereal rotation period of Earth - how about that? In a two-body problem this would be simple, but we have this thing called the Moon, and this thing called the Sun, and to a lesser extent every other body with mass in the Universe, to deal with in maintaining a geostationary orbit. NBody physics introduces a certain degree of chaos to orbital predictions.

*this number is known by calculation using: cube root mu over omega squared. Refer to the Wikipedia.