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Introducing Asteroid 2004 MN4
Posted by
michael
on Fri Dec 24, 2004 12:30 PM
from the hopefully-you'll-hear-nothing-more-about-it dept.
from the hopefully-you'll-hear-nothing-more-about-it dept.
Numerous readers wrote in with bits about a potential asteroid collision: "The recently discovered asteroid 2004 MN4 is currently listed as having a 1/233 chance of hitting the Earth. It is 420 m across and if it strikes the Earth it will release an energy of 1,900 Megatons of TNT (the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, Tsar Bomba had a yield of only 50 Megatons). It is also the only asteroid that currently has a Torino scale value of 2." So, in summary, there's a 1-in-233 chance of the worst disaster in recorded history happening on April 13, 2029, and a 232-in-233 chance of nothing happening. Have a nice day! Update: 12/24 22:14 GMT by M : The rock is now rated a 4 on the Torino scale, or a 1-in-62 chance of impact.
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Friday the 13th (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Friday the 13th (Score:5, Funny)
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In numerology... (Score:5, Funny)
2 + 0 + 2 + 9 = 13
1 + 3 = 4
See? No big deal.:)
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Re:In numerology... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In numerology... (Score:5, Informative)
The number 4 in Japanese is "shi" (U+56DB), but "shi" also means death (U+6B7B)!
It's just as unlucky as 13 in western culture, and more specific about our fate.
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Re:Friday the 13th (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere, on the surface of Mars
Where's the "Kaboom"? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering "Kaboom"!
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In 2029, it won't be our problem. (Score:5, Funny)
Ben Affleck is our solution (Score:5, Funny)
Gigli was almost enough to destroy the U.S. by itself. An asteroid should be no problem.
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Lets start (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing to worry about? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to worry about? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and Frankly, I welcome our new Rock Based over lords.
Re:Nothing to worry about? (Score:3, Informative)
Other than human interference? No, not really. The chances of its running into some other body are probably far less than its running into the earth, and it's not like there's a lot of commuter traffic to get in the way. Space is rather empty -- pardon the cliché.
Re:Nothing to worry about? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Nothing to worry about? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't really think there's too much point in getting concerned just yet.
In other words, you can expect the UN to start work on a treaty and the United States to refuse to sign it.
Like a car on a turn... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Like a car on a turn... (Score:5, Funny)
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Thanks for the breakdown ... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
Re:Thanks for the breakdown ... (Score:5, Informative)
----
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 100.00 km = 62.10 miles
Projectile Diameter: 1320.00 m = 4329.60 ft = 0.82 miles
Projectile Density: 3000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
Energy:
Energy before atmospheric entry: 5.22 x 1020 Joules = 1.25 x 105 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 9.2 x 105years
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
Crater Dimensions:
What does this mean?
Transient Crater Diameter: 13.1 km = 8.12 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 4.63 km = 2.87 miles
Final Crater Diameter: 18.4 km = 11.4 miles
Final Crater Depth: 0.711 km = 0.441 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 3.22 km3 = 0.772 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 24 meters = 78.6 feet
Thermal Radiation:
What does this mean?
Time for maximum radiation: 0.95 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 15.2 km = 9.45 miles
The fireball appears 34.6 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 2.29 x 106 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 20.8 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 110
Effects of Thermal Radiation:
Much of the body suffers second degree burns
Deciduous trees ignite
Seismic Effects:
What does this mean?
The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 20 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 8.0
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 100 km:
VII. Damage negligible in buildings of good design and construction; slight to moderate in well-built ordinary structures; considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed structures; some chimneys broken.
VIII. Damage slight in specially designed structures; considerable damage in ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse. Damage great in poorly built structures. Fall of chimneys, factory stacks, columns, monuments, walls. Heavy furniture overturned.
Ejecta:
What does this mean?
The ejecta will arrive approximately 144 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 26.1 cm = 10.3 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 11.8 cm = 4.65 inches
Air Blast:
What does this mean?
The air blast will arrive at approximately 303 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 157000 Pa = 1.57 bars = 22.3 psi
Max wind velocity: 242 m/s = 540 mph
Sound Intensity: 104 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:
Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
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Re:Thanks for the breakdown ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It broke up, there was no fireball, and I could make more impact overpressure (I chose to be 1,800 km from the impact site) by clapping my hands real hard.
Then again, an impact like "mine" happens every 4,000 years or so.
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D&D odds perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Re:D&D odds perspective (Score:5, Funny)
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John Young strikes again. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://space.balettie.com/Young.html [balettie.com]
Guess it's time to update those "how likely we are to die" stats.
Although maybe not, considering this isn't of the 1km and above weight class.
Any moment now. . . (Score:3, Funny)
Select surivivors NOW (Score:5, Funny)
A special committee would have to be appointed to study and recommend the criteria to be employed, but off-hand, I should say that in addition to the factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously. There would be much time and little to do. With the proper breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio of, say, ten women to each man, I should estimate the progeny of the original group of 200,000 would emerge a hundred years later as well over a hundred million. Naturally the group would have to continually engage in enlarging the original living space.
Re:Select surivivors NOW (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Select surivivors NOW (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Select surivivors NOW (Score:5, Funny)
1) Tell the White House that an asteroid may hit the earth imminently. Ask them to produce a list of everyone who's survival is essential to the future of mankind.
2) Build a giant cave/fallout shelter for them.
3) Announce that the asteroid is about to hit.
4) When everyone on the list is in...seal the door.
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way of life? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I checked, my way of life definitely does *not* include deep habitable mines. It doesn't even have any shallow habitable mines. I can't remember any kind of mine, actually. Pretty mine-free over here.
saved in the nick of time (Score:5, Funny)
Darwin Awards, 2029 (Score:4, Interesting)
You see, the smart will evacuate the target impact area, and the "Award Winners" will flock to the area for the event.
Damn, I just hope *I* can resist going... after all, it *will* be an impressive show. We're talking 1.9 gigatons!
Best quote from the article (Score:5, Funny)
Along with the obligatory Simpsons quote..
Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.
Ever Wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would this be one of those instances of '95% of all statistics are made up'?
I mean, it seeams if he could get a somewhat reasonable graps at the trajectory and distance of the asteroid thy could get a fair guess about probability of impact and location of impact, but how do they arbitrarily convert a guess into a number ratio?
I guess I'd just like to see the math on how they come up with these numbers.
Re:Ever Wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody's stopping you; it's not a secret. Go get it.
But get ready for some heavy lifting; as you dig into it you'll very quickly realize why they didn't try to put any in a popular news article.
I'm not too up on it myself but you can start with phase spaces [wolfram.com], I think, though that hardly touches the real fun, which is the probabilistic aspect of determining the path of an object through all of the influences of the solar system... while I'm not up on the details I do know they don't use naive formulations of that problem, they've got some powerful and brain-bending tricks to prevent the estimate from diffusing too quickly.
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The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that there are at least 232 OTHER asteroids that have only a 1/233 chance of hitting earth.
Re:The problem (Score:3, Informative)
Geographical location? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd wanna emigrate to the country directly opposite of the impact, start a business and buy farms (critical for survival). Also important will be buying of important real estate, for example if its hitting the oceans, buy higher land areas in Bangladesh and start building apartments. Heck just buy the land, let others build apartments close to doomsday.
Shares of companies researching food sources that do not require sunlight, or low light will jump...
Calculate the impact for yourself. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't we know if it will hit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I realize that it's one thing to track an object from earth, and another to track something that's a light year or farther away. But it would still appear to be a straightforward task: get enough pictures that you can tell where it is and where it's going, and interpolate.
So what's the bottleneck here? Poor imaging? Not enough photos? Bad angles? Something else?
Re:Why don't we know if it will hit? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. The image on the telescope is not a theoretical point, but has a certain diameter depending on the telescope diameter, atmospheric distortion, ccd resolution, etc. So you cannot pinpoint the asteroid position precisely, but only give a bounding box.
Combining multiple observations will give you more data, and you can start narrowing down the estimate. Right now the error on the position, projected to year 2029, is about 200 times bigger than the diameter of Earth, so we say that there's a 1/200 probability of impact. A planet is a very tiny target.
When the precision is sufficient to say that, for example, the asteroid will pass by the left side, it will suddenly drop to zero. If it is actually going to impact the Earth, the probability will slowly going up until it will reach 1.
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Thank Goodness- A New Date for the Apocalypse (Score:3, Funny)
Updated to a Torino value of 4. Uh oh. (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like it's up to a 4, now.
Re:Updated to a Torino value of 4. Uh oh. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Updated to a Torino value of 4. Uh oh. (Score:5, Informative)
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Capture? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, there would be some problems. First, as you change the orbit, there's the chance that you'll chage the target country from Outer Bleen to Inner Bleen, upsetting the inhabitants. Then, as you manuver the rock, you're going to probably annoy someone else. The ability to direct such a rock would constitute a "weapon of mass destruction."
I'm guessing positioning the thing for "aerobraking" in the Earth's atmosphere would make some folks nervous, too.
Ok, so this wouldn't be a project where you'd want to mix up your feet and meters or have someone say "oopsie!"
The shame is, humans don't have the brains or organization to take advantage of this opportunity. If this hunk of space junk is going to hit the Earth, I'm not sure we will move it in time. We certainly can move it. I just don't think we'll get our act together.
I wonder who'll be the first to suggest that an impact will be a good thing since the dust may greatly reduce global warming?
Has anyone checked if it's an Apollo rocket body? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone remember the concern in Sept 2002 when an object dubbed "J002E3" was initially believed to be an Earth-crossing asteroid or previously-unknown moon was discovered? [ref: Slashdot [slashdot.org], Planetary Society [planetary.org], CNN [cnn.com]] It turned out to be the Apollo 12 3rd stage rocket body. The mistake was made because an object as bright as it was, if as reflective as a rock, would have been huge. But it wasn't a dark rock - it was a shiny metal cylinder. It had been re-captured into Earth orbit after decades in solar orbit.
Probably every lunar probe and manned mission has sent a rocket booster into solar orbit as space junk. While probabilities of a 2004 MN4 collision in the future are computed, astronomers with the proper data should also try to project it back to see where it was during the Apollo era. Check if it may have come from Earth.
Actually, I'm pretty sure astronomers are already projecting 2004 MN4's orbit back in time to see if there were any other observations of the object before. So this is something else for them to check.
For others to investigate: US Surveyor 3 rocket? (Score:4, Interesting)
I found an online tool to compute estimated positions of the 2004 MN4 asteroid according to the known estimates of its orbit. See http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db?name=2004+MN4 [nasa.gov] .
I ran it backwards in 3-month intervals looking for times that 2004 MN4 has last been near Earth. By this data, there was a very near pass by Earth around April 16-19, 1967.
So I looked through a catalog of lunar launches [nasa.gov]. The NASA lunar probe Surveyor 3 was launched April 17, 1967.
This alone is not sufficient to prove that 2004 MN4 is a booster from Surveyor 3. (Logic still dictates that the scenario of 2004 MN4 being a threatening asteroid is still a possibility on the table.) But with a coincidence as shown in these numbers, Surveyor 3 must be considered in any investigation into 2004 MN4.
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Re:Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
If we route emergency power through the deflector dish, we should be able to create a warp bubble that would temporaril lower the gravitaional constant around the asteroid. That way we could use the ships tractor beam to slightly alter the asteroids trajectory. It won't be much, but I think it will be enough.
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Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Why maybe when all the numbers are available online? Ten million megaton of TNT equivalent of energy is enough energy to vaporize 2 x 10^16 kg water. The Atlantic Ocean by itself has 3 x 10^20 kg of water. That is about 1 part in 10,000 of just the second largest ocean.
That's a lot of water but a very small fraction of the total.
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23 years till it's actually a story (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What is the Point? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a problem of motivating people to non-immediate problems. Like environmental issues, these are not things that engage us now. OTOH terrorism and SARS puts people in an acute panic. With something like asteroids, environmental damage people have to start working on problems now even though there appears to be no good reason to do so.
So getting back to your question, why post about this and why make people aware of a looming future threat? Because hopefully, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers out there realize that this is quite important and might take part in coming up with solutions that could (yes) save earth. And maybe people will make the connection that humans striving for space travel, exploration, and colonization of space is also an activity that can save our ass -- rather than waste precious precious money.
And everyone else can realize, damn, life may well be shorter than we all expect, and be grateful that they and everyone else they know is still alive.
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