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Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth (cnn.com)
Frosty Piss writes from a report via CNN: A small asteroid has been found circling Earth. Scientists say it looks like the asteroid, named 2016 HO3, has been out there for about 50 years. Calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. Scientists think the asteroid is between 120 and 300 feet (37 to 91 meters) in diameter, and NASA says it never gets closer than 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) from Earth. It was found on April 27, 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years? Probably the same way we've missed all the flying saucers!
it's 14 million km away?!
It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
They block dial-up, and since I live in Seattle, that is the fastest connection available where I live.
So is it 50 years for small values of a century, or is it a century for large values of 50 years?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
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So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
If you knew how big space is, you will not compare "long way down the road to the chemist" as peanuts. Peanuts are huge comparatively.
Wonderful H2G2 quote! :-)
Yep, passed over Jodrell bank without a blip, which was a pity as it was exactly the sort of thing they had been looking for.
It's just biding it's time.
Better deep freeze Robert Duvall to have him take care of it later.
A 80 meters diameter sphere has a sectional area of PI * 0.64 * 10^4 square meters. Meanwhile, the surface of the sphere with a radius of 14 million kilometers is 680 * PI * 10^18, let's say 0.68 * PI * 10^21 square meters.
So, at that particular range from Earth you could fit about 10^17 asteroids like that. Quite a bit more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
By the way, the land surface of the USA is approximately 10 million square kilometers, or 10^13 square meters. So finding that asteroid is like finding a coin lost anywhere is the U. S. of A.
Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.
"orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.
However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.
Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either. But people have this Star Trek definition that "orbit" means "just up there and close-by".
There are objects orbiting the Sun that only reappear once every few million years, whip past and then you don't see them again for another few million years. That's still an orbit.
Like Halley's Comet - an orbit doesn't mean it even spends more than 1% of its time actually near you. It could literally orbit at a radius of light year or a billion light years. That's still an orbit.
And with any telescope you can put in your back garden, you can just about get a decent image of most of the planets. That's about it. In terms of anything smaller, even with the largest of observatories and clever tricks, such objects are basically invisible and often only spotted by "Oh, look, there was a datapoint on this set of billions of other datapoints that looks periodic or related".
People misunderstand quite how far the planets are, how big they are, how fast they are moving, how fast we are spinning, and how tiny everything looks from here. Literally, at hundreds of times magnification, planets are only tiny dots in your retina and moving so fast that you can't follow them manually across the sky and need computers and motors to help do it. Yet their real size, speed and distance are inconceivable - in the "hundreds of thousands of Earths put together" ranges.
50 years ago is 1965. When did global warming start? Not then, not even after WW II which caused a huge mount of CO2 from human carbon units.
Tax'em more types never did explain why Mars polar caps melted some. But this Asteroid could have slowed down earth's rotation around the sun and the orbit around the sun dropped ever so slightly as it was trapped into orbit. But hey, tax us more could not tax heads or food, so tax the CO2 to make food for the overpopulated planet. ANY added mass requires a math cleanup of assumptions of orbits.
Food for thought, but in the end, we are only here for the ride on planet earth. Be a good place for aliens to watch us barbarian backwards humans from. I figure aliens would not want us polluting their culture as the would certainly be more evolved and rational than us as a species.
We have a socialist on our city council. She hates the Internet, and hates it even more because her husband works at Microsoft.
We do have a socialist city council member:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant
And, her husband is a Microsoft employee. That is why she doesn't like the Internet. She has fought hard against allowing us fast access to the Internet. I still have dial-up at home because of her fight to extend Comcast's monopoly. They have a government-granted monopoly over most of the city, but do not provide access since they have no incentive to since the city blocks competition.
Actually the sun is quite close in terms of the solar system. It's closer than Mars and Venus sometimes -- in fact the sun can be closer than any planet at times. It's also more than 3x closer than Jupiter's closest approach, and we've sent plenty of probes to Jupiter. Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.
This space intentionally left blank
Perhaps it is just a matter of focus? Search for near time threats near time, search for far time threats far time? Seems logical to me.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Hint: that's why it's called "space".
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.
Well, why can't they schedule the landing for nighttime when it doesn't shine?
(OK, old joke, I'll quit now.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Not a reader eh?
We prefer the term "Mother Ship"/
Actually, the sun isn't anywhere near as hot as its corona. Despite the star being way way hotter than a fresh cup of tea, the layer outside it is hotter still. Imagine tea-temp^tea-temp, now that's seriously hot.
...that's no moon!
The other problem is that it takes more energy to send a probe to the Sun than to Pluto. Obviously that's not insurmountable: we have, after all, sent probes to Mercury. But the point is that distance isn't the only thing that matters.
"You're built too low, son. The fast ones go over your head!" - WC Fields.
I would have up-moderated, but some of the computations seem off...
Sphere area is pi * r^2 (*).
So, for 80m diameter, radius is 40m, that would be pi * 1.6 * 10^3 m^2. Cross sectional area with a sphere differ, but for a 14 * 10^6 km radius sphere, curvature is small enough to ignore.
Sphere with a radius of 14 * 10^9 m has a surface area of pi * 1.96 * 10^20 m^2.
Solid angle formed by the asteroid is (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (14 * 10^9)^2 = (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (1.96 * 10^20) = pi * 8.2 * 10^-18 = 2.6 * 10^-17 sr
Number of such asteroids that could fit onto the sphere is (pi * 1.96 * 10^20) / (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) = 1.225 * 10^17 (that one was correct)
Compared to the land surface of the USA (9.15 * 10^6 km^2), that would be (9.15 * 10^12 m^2) / (1.225 * 10^17) = 7.47 * 10^-5 m^2 = 74.7 mm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 9.8 mm.
Compared to the surface of the earth (~510 * 10^6 km^2), that would be (510 * 10^12 m^2) / (1.225 * 10^17) = 416 * 10^-5 m^2 = 41.6 cm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 7.3cm.
I guess Muphry's law applies, will someone double-check ? :)
(*) When do we get enough Unicode for greek and math symbols ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?
The same way we missed the dwarf planet Eris which is 27% more massive than Pluto and has likely been orbiting there for billions of years. Eris was only discovered in 2005! That means we would have to admit that a fucking planet was orbiting in our back yard unseen even though NASA et. al. promised we'd seen all the big shit that could be planet killers for decades. And that's the REAL reason that Pluto is no longer a Planet, because it would be embarrassing to the Astronomers.
Kupiter Belt Objects? What Kupiter belt? Don't give me the "Kupiter Belt" and "Oort Cloud" bullshit. There is no evidence of a Kupiter belt or Oort cloud. The comets we've sent probes to are hard dry dusty things, and yet they still form tails and don't have vents of any kind that we can see. Their minuscule water seen in spectrograms in the tail (but much less in the coma) is probably due to H+ ions from the sun interacting with SiO2 (silica / rock). In the lab when bombarding rocks with H+ ions (protons) some of the Oxygen atoms break free. Some of these O's bond with H's to form Hydroxide (which we do see more of in the coma than the tail of a comet).
The sun is generating an electrical gradient due to the H+ ions it pours out. The comets are coming from further away from the sun, so they come from a more negatively charged environment relative to the sun. The difference in electrical potential creates something like the Aurora Borealis as the electricity discharges. This is why the cometary Coma glows in UV light, same as other electrical events. The interaction of charged particles produce more chemical reactions and bond more O's with H's or HO's and form H2O, water. And that's where the extra water comes from in the tail of a comet -- but only a minority percentage of the cometary tail is water.
However, even though these electrical phenomenon have laboratory equivalents, the Astronemers still cling to the "Dirty Snowball" model of comets for which there is zero-evidence nor any laboratory experiment to back the theory. Where is the experiment with an ice filled rock heated under a heat lamp and producing jets in the laboratory? There is none, there never will be one. The "wet comet" model is bogus.
Comets sometimes flare up as they are very far from the sun in cold space and traveling away from the sun (having been positively charged they re-enter more negatively charged space). How could we miss that Cometary Tails are glowing charged particles? The same way we missed a small Asteroid. You've been fucking lied to. So many times It's hard to believe shit is a mistake anymore: The upholders of the current astronomical dogma are censoring evidence of EM interactions at interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic scales.
Why is that the case?
Just one of Santa's early jet-propelled sleighs to cope with population growth (you think flying reindeer were always going to keep up? get real)
Unfortunately this one reached near escape velocity. The test elves bailed out in time.
So nothing to see here. Pay no attention to 2016 HO HO HO
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Shielding from heat and radiation probably. All that shielding is going to add weight to the probe. Then it has to battle the stronger gravitational pull.
sphere area is 4 pi r^2.
However hard to learn the language might be, at least we'll be spared from "feet", "inches", "miles" and other such stupidities...
Because orbital physics.
Basically Earth flies a million miles an hour perpendicular to the sun. To reach the sun, you need to go to zero. Thats the same as getting the ship from zero to 1,000,000mph.
All figures approximate.
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
We should have been listening for it after all space is the final front ear :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Where were you the other day? I quoted Marvin and all I got was psychoanalyzed!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
It's official then, according to the new rules that determined Pluto is not a planet, EARTH is NOT a Planet. Since it hasn't cleared it's orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
See this for a good explanation.
Delta-v from low earth orbit to the sun requires shedding 24km/s. Delta-v from earth orbit to pluto only requires 8.4km/s.
Actually you can get to the sun with far less -- something like 8.8km/s -- but it would take fantastically longer. In effect you would escape the entire solar system first, then kill your angular momentum completely.
Or you could take advantage of moon or other planet flybys, again reducing the energy required by trading it for massive amounts of time.
Now the question is not "how come we missed it for 50 years?". The question is "how come we found it in just 50 years! OMG our astronomers are awesome!".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
sphere area is 4 pi r^2
Oops, right, I even had it in front of my nose when checking for steradians. I always mess up some mundane detail.
With that in mind, this gives:
Asteroid cross-section: pi * 1.6 * 10^3 m^2
Sphere surface: pi * 7.84 * 10^20 m^2
Solid angle: 2.6 * 10^-17 sr
Number of such asteroids that could fit onto the sphere: 4.9 * 10^17
Compared to the land surface of the USA: 18,7 mm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 4.9 mm.
Compared to the surface of the earth: 10,4 cm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 3.6 cm.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
That's no moon.
We can of course see objects much, much smaller if they're giving off enough light. But this object might emit mostly in the infrared, being a fairly cool object. And then the problem is that earths' atmosphere absorbs IR, and past orbital telescopes weren't used to look for nearby objects. Those were used to look for cold, faint stars far away, which means long exposure times.. A near-earth object would just be a faint blur in such an image, even if you happened to look in the right direction.
... turn it into a space station?
You bring another important point. Most of the time when we "see" objects, it is on reflected light. Light intensity decays as the square of the distance. In a normal room the distance between the light source and the object, and the distance from object to observer is usually small and the loss of intensity is negligible. But in this case, there is significant distance between sun and the asteroid and significant distance between asteroid and earth. Given law of squares, the number of reflected photons would be so few, the astronomer could count it one by one ;-) So it is even more amazing that we found this thing.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Even when we are looking for a particular object and even one that we made ourselves and is on the planet we seem to have incredible difficulty finding it. Just look at flight MH370 where we still don't really know what happened to it or where it went down despite a huge international effort and the size of that is very comparable at 73.9m in length.
He must have stole that from Foghorn Leghorn.
Isn't the title clear enough?!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
IN the USA, we have no way to even know which of our neighbors are chemists.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Why is it called a Satellite?
I thought those had to be man-made.
Learn to fucking report. The asteroid orbits the Sun not the Earth. It's not a moon nor satellite. It's best described as a companion because the asteriod and earth follow SIMILAR ORBIT around the sun. Nothing more. Just read the JPL article: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n... Fuck off CNN.
See "Mr. Bass's Planetoid", the 2nd or 3rd book in her children's book series about the mushroom people. I remember reading it as a kid, but can't recall too many details.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
OK, settle down. Now tell me, are we going to name the object Bethselamin, and can you tell me more about that place?
Wait... maybe it is. Would this count as Earth's 2nd moon / moonlet rather than an asteroid, if it's in natural stable orbit around the Earth?
Turn in your geek card as you exit. It's from HHGTTG.
Also, in space, you can't hear the "whoosh"-ing sound.
Ah, those first atomic explosions got someone's attention.
After due consideration, they've stayed the F away out there, since.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
JPL gives it magnitude 24 at closest approach, but since it is in a solar orbit similar to Earth's, it only gets that close twice a year. There's a nice animation available at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c... (Java required). Just set it for one day incréments and hit ">>" to let it run.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
it takes more energy to reach the orbit of mercury from orbit at earth's distance than to leave solar system, let alone send something into sun
Yeah, after the first reply I thought about the moon, maybe it's not as easy to just do one close by pass?
3e-9 radians is 0.6 milliarcseconds. The best optical telescopes have a resolution around 20 milliarcseconds. Very-long-baseline radio interferometers can get down to about 0.2 milliarcseconds, but this object would be in the near field for them, so their imaging techniques wouldn't work.
Basically, there isn't any instrument on Earth that would show this object as anything other than a point.
Might be useful to hollow it out and use it for a small space station, would be a great place to test out robot mining etc.
Lottery? Or let the astronomers do it?
I suggest "Invisus."
Also, the movie that quote came from was so forgettable even I do not remember its name.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I believe it was Under Siege 2, though. And the correct reply would be "never speak again".
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I'm amazed that Earth's gravity extends that far. So, Earth's gravity extends at least 25% of the distance to Mars at its closest point to Earth.
Um, no. That's not how it works. You need sufficient fuel to change it's perapsis so that it's inside the atmosphere - and that can be a great deal of fuel indeed. (Nothing just 'falls' into the atmosphere.) Not to mention, if you're not already in Earth's gravity well (I.E. in Earth orbit), you'll need a great deal *more* fuel to rendezvous with Earth.
Capsules are actively guided. Rocks... are not.
my idea for the name of the next Very Large Array: the vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big array
So, according to "scientists" this thing has been out there for approx. 50 years, which they describe as about a century. And it is somewhere about 120 to 300 feet in diameter (really? Do ANY scientists still use those archaic measurements?). Sheesh! Get out the Ouija board, guys, we need to nail down this sucker!
Which means guidance and control packages will have to be regularly shipped up. It won't be as simple as you mistakenly assumed.
The Apollo capsule may not have, but the Apollo Service Module certainly did.
Seriously, are you so monumentally stupid you don't even know how Apollo worked?
"That's no moon."
movie?
I think you'll find it was a radio play
Wonderful H2G2 quote! :-)
Yup :) I love everything the man wrote, and re-watched the (latest) movie just the other day :)
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This is raw material in free orbit, a gift from the gods of space and time. We dig in and smelt and melt and build like mad. Building in free fall makes endless sense.