Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight

jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."

Don't hold your breath.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches

Don't bother holding your breath. At magnitude 10.3 it's too dim to see without a telescope to gather extra light. By a factor of 50 or so (even on a clear dark sky).

Reasons I won't be getting the telescope out

[flyboyfred]

1. 10th magnitude? A bit of a reach for my 90mm scope, especially with light pollution.
2. Forecast is cloudy with rain/snow. Won't see the sky anyway.
3. I live in Minnesota and it's January -- c-c-c-c-old!
4. 2:30am CST on a weeknight? I have a job! That's past my bedtime.

I did catch an asteroid once, and it was kinda cool. Using a map of the asteroid's path, I set up the scope on some recognizable stars and waited for it. It looked like a faint speck moving against the background. Not sure it's worth the trouble for a second look.

Re:One MILLION Dollars!

[Morty]

NASA needs to spearhead projects that are useful, in collaboration with the rest of the space-viewing world. The fact that there isn't a loud voice shouting about this concept to the pols is embarrassing.

What makes you think this isn't already happening? NASA already does this. On the national level, the US has the Near Earth Object [nasa.gov] program headed out of NASA's JPL. The Spaceguard Foundation [wikipedia.org] acts on the international level.

NASA has a fair number of other projects that are immediately "useful", as opposed to indirectly useful, as part of the Earth Observing System [nasa.gov]. The TRMM [nasa.gov] project, for example, monitors tropical rain, which is useful for predicting hurricanes.

DISCLOSURE: my job is in aerospace. :)

Re:Intelligence Test for Homo Spaiens...!

[Grishnakh]

The Tunguska event isn't the only warning we've had; we got two more warnings within the past decade alone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitim_event [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Mediterranean_Event [wikipedia.org]

The first occurred in rural Russia, just like Tunguska, but the second one was in the Mediterranean, and had about the same power as the Nagasaki bomb (double Hiroshima). It could have easily struck a little to the north and hit highly populated Europe, or to the east and hit India/Pakistan, touching off a nuclear war there.

So far, we're failing the Civilization Intelligence Test in a really big way.

Re:One MILLION Dollars!

[Artifakt]

Charles Simonyi, (formerly of Microsoft), has donated $20 million, and Bill Gates (also formerly of Microsoft if memory serves) $10 million to help build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile. The LSST is a super-widefield scope, expected to be able to survey the entire sky every three nights. One of its major uses will be early spotting of earth crossing asteroids.
Total cost of the project is around 400 Million. The two donations above will fund three of the scope's main mirrors. Observations are expected to start in 2015.
I know Microsoft isn't too popular around here, but you can relax a little - someone is funding a huge, (not so) cheap project that could potentially help save the entire Earth from annihilation.