How We Knew AL00667 Would Miss Earth 290
jefu writes "In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though. This story (from NASA/Ames) talks about the discovery of the object and the process that astronomers went through to determine if the asteroid was or was not a threat."
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad they already made the (17 versions of) the movie about this. It's a nice story.
Flipped a coin? (Score:1, Insightful)
We probably could have had something in place to shoot such a threat down if we had fully funded the Star Wars MDS project, but sadly geopolitics killed that project.
It might be time to start thinking realistically about ways to deflect asteroids from Earth impact instead of relying on 'we worked it out using computer simulation' assurances.
Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Within a couple of days!? (Score:2, Insightful)
No problem! ... Bruce Willis will bust us out! ... Our super-geniuses will come up with a 5min to deadline plan and blast this bugger to pieces! ... It won't hit us anyway, because it did not hit us up to today.
Tell me Mr.Politician, what is more important: Survival of mankind or playing the powermonger game with your politician-buddys?
I say, if politicians (which are by the way trusted with OUR FATE!) behave like they do today they are gambling with the chance of survival for the entire human race. This should be considered a crime and prosecuted accordingly.
Recognition does not increase likelihood (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not make such a collision more likely in the next fifty years -- or hundred and fifty, or fifteen hundred. Significant and successful collision are _rare_, much rarer than earthquakes, tornados, or even human-caused meteorological effects (as in weather systems, not meteors).
It doesn't matter if we can see "just how close we came". It matters that we know, empirically, that there are vastly more pressing concerns.
What I don't want to see is an orbital weapons platform deployed under false premises. If the pretenses are true, that's a different story. Just don't tell me its to shoot down asteroids!
--Dan
Re:Flipped a coin? (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning they'd be pointing in the wrong direction.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a totally futile to even discuss what should be done if we are going to get hit, since there is nothing we can do about it at the moment. If the death of 80% of the worlds population and the fall of all governments is nigh, it hardly matters how people die or how the governmenst fall. It only confuses the real issue: how the hell are we going to fund a global defense system instead of funding luxury for 10% of the planet.
Re:Recognition does not increase likelihood (Score:5, Insightful)
We also know that major impacts, the sort that changes the climate over the entire globe and causes mass extinction of species has happened atleast on a few occasions.
But we don't really know enough to say anything about the true risks. For that reason alone, the first nice thing to do would probably be to increase funding for telescopes, radars and other instruments for better accessing the real risk. That is not a very expensive proposition, as this is an area that is very lowly funded today, a little bit of extra cash will go a long way towards establishing the real risks.
If we should do anything more depends on the risks and the costs of potential defences. It's a cost/benefit calculation.
You are rigth that ICBM-interception-systems are irrelevant for this purpose. All realistic systems for doing something about asteroid-impacts rely on the fact that a small change to the orbit of the thing a long distance from earth will result in a major change, enough to miss the earth, by the time it gets here. Changing the orbit in the last few hours is going to be impractical, it'd require huge amounts of energy. Sligthly more practical migth be blowing the thing up, which would result in a large number of smaller impacts instead of a single big one.
To stop a ICBM you need to hit it with, say, the explosive force of a hand-grenade. That's not going to cut it if you want to blow apart a asteroid of extinction-threathening size.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flipped a coin? (Score:2, Insightful)
what you would want to do is attaching some kind of nuclear device to it, which melts away pieces of its surface and with the gas and pressure created it slowly pushes the meteor (or comet) in another direction.
it would be like pushing a huge ship away with your hands, whilte it is just floating in the water: probably slow, but it would definitely work. there's no (relevant) opposing force in space
Re:Flipped a coin? (Score:3, Insightful)
So instead of one huge target you could in principle land on, you'd get a swarm of smaller but still deadly rocks that would rain devastation on Earth?
No, the only permanent solution to the extinction level event problem is to get some of us off this goddamn planet.
Re:Recognition does not increase likelihood (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a classic mistake, confusing risk with probability.
And the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it comes pretty high up on my scale as consequences go.
Re:Recognition does not increase likelihood (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, if you really doubt that this happens, you need only to take a look at the moon. It has no atmosphere which causes smaller asteroids to evaporate before impact, and also helps washing away the signs of impacts after they happen. It's probably a fair bet that the earth gets hit more often than the moon, given that it's so much larger. It's also a fair bet that anything that is big enough to create a major crater on the moon is also big enough to punch trough the atmosphere and create major destruction here.
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
In the latter case, your statistics do not give me confidence
Re:Natural diaster... (Score:5, Insightful)
do you really think a global cataclysm would make people work together for the common good more than they do today? Or is it more likely that resources would become greatly limited so humans would be more likely to kill each other for their own good? While human life is still a struggle for resources, I doubt the red cross was around in the caveman days, helping the guy who got clubbed on the head and had his dinner stolen.
Re:Fort Wal (Score:3, Insightful)
...ask under what authority the "declaration" was made.
Re:Flipped a coin? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you think shooting stars seem to streak a long way across the sky?
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, by the definition of the words, a 'near miss' IS a miss, and 'nearly miss' is a verb phrase meaning to almost miss.
Re:Server Unresponsive, Article Text (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amazing that they can make accurate
observations and orbital calculations on a
30 meter object so far out. I can't imagine
why anyone would be complaining about the
process when it is working so brilliantly.
Re:Flipped a coin? (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of one huge target you could in principle land on, you'd get a swarm of smaller but still deadly rocks that would rain devastation on Earth?
I've always wondered about this. If I have a chunk of rock 1 km in diameter hurtling toward the earth, wouldn't it be better to break it up into small chunks so it would be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere? Even though the mass is the same, the surface area presented to the atmosphere would be greatly increased, which would be much more efficient at ablating away mass and slowing down the incoming pieces (transferring energy to the atmosphere instead of into making a crater).
Where's the trade-off point between distributed death from all the smaller chunks and increased burnup in the atmosphere?
Re:An exercise for the reader (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes.
Trillions of tons of small rubble would burn up in the atmosphere. Yes, it'd be a HELL of a show, but still much less dangerous than a single, massive strike.