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Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out

Posted by timothy on Thu Jan 10, 2008 06:59 PM
from the now-we-can-go-back-to-fretting-about-earth dept.
Space Science
An anonymous reader writes with a followup to previous news noting the possibility that an asteroid would collide with Mars: "Further observations have reduced the odds of asteroid 2007 WD5 impacting Mars to approximately 1 in 10,000. According to NASA this asteroid followed the same pattern of increasing in probability, then finally being ruled out as a threat."
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[+] Mars Asteroid Impact More Likely Than Before 207 comments
sheldie writes "The probability of asteroid 2007 WD5 impacting Mars has been revised following further observations. The chance of impact has increased from 1.3% to 3.9%" This is a follow-up to earlier coverage of this asteroid from last week.
Submission: Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out by Anonymous Coward
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  • I'm sure astronomers were really hoping that this would happen. It would have been the scientific event of the decade.
    • What if they did the opposite of what everyone thinks they'll do if a sizeable object is going to hit Earth? What if they detonate a nuke and reroute the asteroid to hit Mars? I think they wouldn't do it because the newspapers would say,"The government is aiming asteroids at planets, are they going to use them as weapons in the future?"

      • Re:What if they caused it to happen? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Megane (129182) on Thursday January 10 2008, @08:20PM (#21993798)
        At this point, even with favorable orbits, and a payload already loaded and ready for launch, you still couldn't get there in time. The fast orbit to Mars still takes six months. The slow orbit takes two years. I don't think they even knew about this event six months ago.

      • What if they did the opposite of what everyone thinks they'll do if a sizeable object is going to hit Earth? What if they detonate a nuke and reroute the asteroid to hit Mars? I think they wouldn't do it because the newspapers would say,"The government is aiming asteroids at planets, are they going to use them as weapons in the future?"

        Even if we *could* pull that off, why *would* we? Just move the thing out of the way. If there's a tree branch blocking my driving lane, I move it into the ditch (not into oncoming traffic).

      • What if they send up a team of offshore oil drillers to land on the asteroid and drive around on it and plant the nuke? That would be awesome! You could even make a movie about it... oh wait. They already made that movie. And it sucked. Oh well.
    • In related news, by an odd coincidence, a huge asteroid landed on NASA headquarters and totally obliterated it. Martians everywhere cheered.

  • NEO prediction needs more funding (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday January 10 2008, @07:14PM (#21993130) Homepage Journal
    Well, actually what it needs is a comp-sci department of a major university to take it on as a research project and apply for many many government grants for super-computer time. Simulating a chaotic system is never easy, but failure to calculate the orbit of a large NEO could be catastrophic.

  • What a shame! (Score:5, Funny)

    by techno-vampire (666512) on Thursday January 10 2008, @07:17PM (#21993170) Homepage
    I guess there's not going to be a Mars-Shattering KABOOM! And I was so looking forward to it.

  • This sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Grishnakh (216268) on Thursday January 10 2008, @07:22PM (#21993216)
    A big-ass asteroid hitting our nearest planetary neighbor and causing massive damage would have been a good wake-up call to humanity. The only thing that would have been better would have been a big-ass asteroid smacking the Moon, leaving a crater large enough to see with the naked eye from Earth.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuantumG (50515)
      Nah, that'd be worse. At least one astrophysicist would say that this is what the he Moon is for and you'd have the media repeating it and eventually everyone would believe the earth is immune to NEO.s.
    • A wake-up call to what, exactly? We're all gonna die burning asteroid death (maybe)?

      See, I really don't get this argument. I can understand a wake-up call about how we're messing with nature so much it's gonna end in tears. I can understand wake-up calls about poverty, misery, illness, all these things in our world. These are things we can at least try to do something about and the more people actually do, the better they may get. Or not, that's a different debate, but the point is that the world is chok
      • People who actually have any experience with these things know that there is something we could do, if we detect a collision early enough. The problem is that we don't yet have a program to do that.. because getting money for these things is all politics.

        So yes, just like the environment or poverty or (formally) disease, whether or not an extinction event is allowed to occur is entirely up to the politicians. A wake-up call is needed for them to justify the expense.

        • Again, 1 in a kajillion chance.

          Moving an asteroid off course would seem likely to require huge nuclear warheads in any case. Obviously, we can't wait until we see something headed towards us in a telescope to start refining uranium or whatever the hell, so we'd have to produce those huge warheads in advance.

          So if the options are (a) have some gigaton warheads sitting around in a bunker Just In Case or (b) hope we don't get hit, I'm thinking (b) is by far the SAFER option, because there's probably a

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by cdrguru (88047)
            I'm going to try really hard not to use a lot of adjectives to describe your thinking on this.

            Are you nuts? Nuclear warheads? That is probably the absolute very last thing you would want to try to deflect a large body with. It might fracture, which would make problems much much worse.

            You see, the problem with lots of little rocks entering the atmosphere is a little detail called "atmospheric heating". Rocks get warm, transfer their heat to the air. A few rocks, no problem. Lots and lots of little rock
            • no, see, this retard still thinks that "sufficient lead time" means "2 or 3 days". That's why he's talking about nuclear weapons. He's a product of Hollywood.

            • All it takes is a little push, or as previously alluded to, some paint to absorb solar radiation differently. No nuclear warheads. Maybe an Orion-type or NERVA propulsion system to get out that far.

              We don't need gigaton nukes to deflect asteroids. A simple megaton one like the ones we already have stockpiled in huge quantities will do just fine. And as for fracturing, that's simple: you detonate the nuke a distance away from the asteroid, so that you push it instead of fracture it.

              Of course, if you detect

          • Re:This sucks. (Score:4, Informative)

            by canadian_right (410687) <alexander.russell@telus.net> on Thursday January 10 2008, @10:30PM (#21994804) Homepage

            Moving an asteroid is MUCH easier than solving poverty, crime or homelessness. If you have enough lead time it takes a relatively small rocket attached to the asteroid to steer it clear of the earth. A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force! [umich.edu] Another simple proposal. [technovelgy.com]

            On the other hand, there is already enough food for everyone on the whole planet, but human greed, for both wealth and power, prevents a huge number of people from enjoying peace and prosperity. And no amount of technical or political knowledge is going to help.

            In short, it is a very low chance event with very bad results that we CAN do something about.

            • A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force!

              Paper beats rock, then? We already knew that.
      • Hey, wake up!

        The chances of a large asteroid impact in your lifetime are MUCH HIGHER than you think. The Earth is currently a "single point of failure" for humanity. We have the ability (and the obligation) to detect and escape such impacts.

      • I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it.
        Detected early enough, you can push a future impactor away from its course with a couple of buckets of paint. You just need to invest some insignificant sum into projects like Spaceguard so you can do something about it.

      • A wake-up call to a 1 in a 1000000000000000000000000000000 chance of a piece of rock hitting us? I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it.

        Two words: Bruce Willis.

      • A wake-up call to a 1 in a 1000000000000000000000000000000 chance of a piece of rock hitting us?

        Ignoring the threat is asinine. Your statement of the odds shows a clear misunderstanding of the reality.

        The odds are exactly 100% that we'll get hit. It's just a matter of timing. Yes the chances you'll get hit in your lifetime are slim (though you've added too many zeros). If you don't give a damn about the human race surviving, you should skip the rest of this message.

        If you think I'm exaggerating, plenty of s

        • Your statement of the odds shows a clear misunderstanding of the reality.

          Never attribute to misunderstanding to reality what can adequately be explained by repeated bashing of keys for effect. However - no offense intended, but your statement of exactly 100% is also misunderstanding reality. On top of my head, I can think of three scenarios where earth will never get hit by an asteroid without us actively preventing such an event:

          • Earth is destroyed through other means beforehand
          • The Universe runs out of
          • And while these (especially No 3) seem pretty remote possibilites,



            Actually, we can be pretty sure that No 1 will happen at some point (when solar luminosity has increased enough to boil the oceans off the surface of Earth), but that's still over a billion years off. No 2 is pretty unlikely. The solar system is just too full of all kinds of rocks. No 3 is hard to predict due to the sheer number of objects in the solar system that all interact gravitationally.

    • Rendezvous with Rama [wikipedia.org] has a particulary stunning description of an asteroid hitting earth on its first pages (which can be seen here [amazon.com] in Amazon). The book as a whole is fantastic, but i always found that snippet very powerful and visual. In the book, it triggers the creation of an near-earth object monitoring system which sets the events for the rest of the story.

      I agree, maybe we need such a wake-up call.
      • the people at stargate command will find a way to save us.
          • What makes you think you can't stop it? Because you're unaware of basic astrophysics? If you know sufficiently in advance you can easily change the orbit of the object so it is no longer a threat. It's a chaotic system.. small changes in the inputs result in large changes in the outputs. But obviously if we bury our heads in the sand we have no chance of avoiding the catastrophe.

            What's more alarming is that if you have a *very* good model of the solar system you can work out how much you need to nudge a

          • Re:This sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Grishnakh (216268) on Thursday January 10 2008, @08:14PM (#21993762)
            Sorry, but you're the dumbass here.

            If a Tunguska-sized asteroid (or worse, a Yucatan-sized one) is en route for earth, and we have 20 years' notice, it wouldn't be that hard to launch some nukes up there to nudge it into a safe orbit in time. We went from Sputnik to landing on the moon in less time than that, and all we have to do is make launch systems capable of taking our already-existing nuclear warheads and planting them on or near an asteroid some distance from earth (but probably less distance than Mars, which we have no trouble sending probes to). The only thing that's actually preventing us from deflecting asteroids is the fact that we don't have any prior warning of them, simply because we don't bother to look for them very hard.

            You talk about correcting the orbital patterns of an asteroid as if it's an impossible feat, but as I've already shown, it's quite realistic. The problem is just knowing about the asteroid in time to do something. A nuclear weapon can move an asteroid only slightly. With 10 years' notice, that's all you need. But if the thing is going to hit the earth in 1 day, the amount of power needed to move that rock would be astronomical. So who's the dumbass?

            As for "infinitesimal", as if an asteroid strike is unlikely, there are craters all over our planet from large asteroid strikes. I live a short distance away from one, in fact, located at "Meteor Crater, Arizona" (it's on Google Maps; it's where the final scene of Starman was shot incidentally). There's a much, much bigger one on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico which was an extinction event. And in recent history, a comet came down in Tunguska, Siberia in the early 1900s, wiping out a huge amount of forest. If that had been a populated area, instead of a remote frozen tundra that even now is mostly unexplored, the devastation would have been greater than any natural disaster in history most likely. Another asteroid (or comet, not much difference really) striking the earth in the next few hundred years isn't as unlikely as you suggest, and certainly a much bigger worry than the Sun reaching the end of its lifespan, which we're fairly certain will take several billion years, which is more than enough time to deal with that problem.
            • ...and certainly a much bigger worry than the Sun reaching the end of its lifespan, which we're fairly certain will take several billion years, which is more than enough time to deal with that problem.

              I'm sorry, but every time I see someone worrying about this I have to laugh. Both the Earth and the Sun are estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old. The end of the Sun's lifespan is estimated to be about 5 to 6 billion years off. It's not even halfway through it's life. By contrast, mankind has been aro
              • Humanity will be LONG dead and 100% forgotten by that point.

                Probably. But I like the sci-fi idea that we'll get off this planet, spread our seed 'round the galaxy, and evolve. So that by the time the Sun consumes the Earth, our two-headed five-eyed descendants can drop by the solar system and watch the fireworks for fun.

                Back on topic: people _did_ get a 'wake up call' about the (v. small) threat asteroids pose about 10 years ago when there were two summer blockbusters on that theme. There was a lot of disc

                • Maybe you should learn to read. My comment had absolutely nothing to do with fending off a meteor impact. My comment was entirely directed to people worrying about what happens to mankind when the Sun goes supernova. Simply put, there will be no mankind left when the Sun goes supernova. If you want to argue otherwise it shows that you have a complete and total lack of comprehension of the timescales involved in the Earth and Sun's history, and the history of life on this planet.
                  • My comment was entirely directed to people worrying about what happens to mankind when the Sun goes supernova.



                    The Sun will not go supernova. It's simply not massive enough.

            • "Meteor Crater, Arizona" (it's on Google Maps; it's where the final scene of Starman was shot incidentally).

              And also the final scene of Mac and Me [imdb.com].

              I should really have posted this AC...
      • Sorry, I forgot Mars is slightly farther than Venus. But an asteroid hitting Venus would be a non-event, unless the asteroid was gigantic. Venus is covered with thick clouds, so the surface isn't visible to us. Plus, there's a theory that the surface liquifies every so often because of the extreme heat and runaway greenhouse effect. With Mars, a large asteroid impact would be easily visible from earth, or with our rovers and probes if on the other side.
        • Jupiter is almost nothing but gas (at least what's visible to us) and yet we were able to witness the impacts and effects. Not only that, but Jupiter is pretty far away. The whole thing wasn't exactly a non-event. Average Joe-Six-Pack may not have cared too much, but it still made the news on a regular basis around the time of the event. My guess is an asteroid impact on Venus would punch a hole through it's atmosphere and scar it, and while a crater on the surface may not be visible (in the visible spe
          • That's a good point. It's just that I think a big, visible crater in photographs would make more of an impact on Joe Six-pack's mind than a rock punching a hole through Venus's atmosphere. Mars is simply a lot more like earth than Venus in many ways: it's rocky, it has an atmosphere something like ours (it exists, but it's mostly transparent unlike Venus's), and we already have probes there driving around and sending back images. If a big asteroid struck it, our probes would be able to see the effects fi
  • "would" is wrong "might", maybe. Would suggests a very high probability. The previous postings hinted at 1 in 75 and that has now been downgraded to 1 in 30k.

    How can we mock USA Today when so-called geeks are so poor at handling numbers.

  • ... that the asteroid uses the metric system ?
  • Now the question is where is it going? Relatively speaking, it's rather cramped in space around there, so we may have to see what Mars' does to its trajectory before we know where else it could go. Hopefully it'll hit something not-earth (or moon).
  • Anyone living in a southern coastal state should be familiar with this pattern.

    When a hurricane is first spotted heading our way, its usually too far out to have any idea where its going to end up. As it keeps heading our way, the likelihood of a strike gets higher and higher. When we're in the 5-day cone, we start making rushes for the store. When we're in the 3-day cone, we put up shutters. Then, a day before, the cone narrows to the point that we see its going far enough South or West that we're n

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