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A Small Asteroid Buzzed Earth Wednesday, But Everything's Cool (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If the Earth were a person, it might have felt a sudden wind rustling its hair when a small asteroid whizzed past the planet on Wednesday. The asteroid, saddled with the name 2016 RB1, is a new discovery. Astronomers just noticed it on September 5 thanks to the keen eye of a telescope from the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona. What makes 2016 RB1 so sneaky is its small size. It's only about 25 to 50 feet (7 to 16 meters) in diameter. It passed within just 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) of Earth, which NASA helpfully translates into 1/10th the distance from Earth to the moon. In terms of the massive size of the galaxy, that qualifies as a relatively close shave. An animated GIF of the flyby shows a tiny white dot moving against a grainy space background. The asteroid's trajectory kept it well out of the way of any satellites, and the planet was never in any danger.
subject says it all
So I'm too lazy to do more than ask the question: what if it had hit earth? How bad would that have been? Are we talking "hey, what was that noise?" or would it have destroyed a city block, or more?
25000 miles sounds like a lot, but all the geo-stationary satellites (50+) are just about that high at about 22000 mi.
-Styopa
Is that it passed at 6.3 earth radii. If earth was a standard football (radius 4.5 inches/11.5 cm) it passed 28 inches (72 cm) away. Comfortably safe.
Explains Trumps' hair.
Table-ized A.I.
...The asteroid's trajectory kept it well out of the way of any satellites...
Fortunately, the trajectory took the rock to the south of Earth where there are very few satellites. If the rock had passed by at that same distance on the equatorial plane (where the geosynchronous satellites reside at 25,000 miles), many, many people would have lost a lot of sleep.
I for one am grateful for learning about this after it was all over.
Heavens, my pretty little head would've been worried for three days, had it been publicized then...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When a near-miss asteroid of any size is spotted with only three day's notice, it's probably not a good idea for them to say that "The planet was never in any danger."
Unless they want everyone to just shrug it off and go about our normal business while we wait to die in a sudden 'KT' fiery maelstrom.
Do they?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
See those shooting stars at night? (Well, you probably don't due to light pollution. Go out to the country and you'll notice them if you keep looking up.) Those are *all* bits of space matter that got into our atmosphere, and they happen all the time. Head on over to http://spaceweather.com . Scroll on down to the All-Sky Fireball Network, and look at the number of arcs showing the number of known fireballs in the last 24 hours. Then take one more item down to Near Earth Asteroids and look at the list of objects that are currently being tracked. There are always a dozen or so objects being looked at that are close to Earth, astronomically speaking. Yes, it's pretty rare to get one at .1 LD (lunar distance.) But inside the distance from here to the moon is nothing special. It's not uncommon for an object to be detected just days before an Earth transit. The size of this object is certainly nothing special.
(To the guy above pointing out this is half the size of the Cheyabinsk meteorite.... learning square-cube laws are really helpful in understanding that half the size means about 10% of the volume of the greater object... which has a lot to do with amount of possible energy release, not to mention odds of an uncontrolled object not surviving entry.)
Might as well panic yourself that your car will get pancaked on your drive home by a careless driver - the odds of that occuring are *MUCH* greater.
In terms of the massive size of the galaxy, the closest distance of this rock to Earth and the distance from Pluto to the Sun are pretty much the same.
Phew, so the people and real estate don't matter. That's fine I guess?
The planet is FINE.
I'm just thinking, we are going to need some fast acting powerful way to defend against something like that. Maybe we can etch some wings on that asteroid so it catches wind when it hits the atmosphere and ejects itself like a skipping rock. Did anyone catch the velocity of that asteroid relative to earth?
This one has to win the biggest non-story award so far this year. This shit happens constantly and is not worth mentioning.
Can someone chime in with the results of a hit? Will that thing survive entry/blow up in the atmosphere/do damage? What would the expect force be (m * a) and what would that mean to us in layman's terms?
An anonymous reader didn't write that -- A freelance C|NET tech writer by the name of Amanda Kooser wrote that. In fact, that Slashdot summary was basically a copy/paste of her entire C|NET article.
If anything it should say "An anonymous reader informed Slashdot of an article on C|NET written by Amanda Kooser which states" and then include a summary of her article and NOT her entire article.
It was estimated as being a little bit smaller than the Chelyabinsk meteor which exploded high up in Russian skies not long ago with the energy of around 20 - 30 Hiroshimas.
That size isn't planet-threatening, but if it remained intact and reached the ground in a populated area it would obviously be catastrophic.
It hit Earth and we all died. You blind fool.
Sounds more like a stealth scout ship to me!
the tunguska one was around that size also, small but still deadly, these little sneaky fuckers can devastate big cities if it they ever impact us