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."

One MILLION Dollars!

[Amorymeltzer]

The problem is that when you say something is 540,000km away, the huge general population tunes out. That's an ASTRONOMICAL number by most considerations, so nobody gives two shits. Except, as it turns out, we're dealing with astronomy, so astronomical numbers are the norm. The fact that nobody is really considering funding a worldwide effort to try and map all the objects that could potentially cause a major threat is disturbing. Hillary voted for $1 Million for a Woodstock museum - doesn't it make more sense to fund a huge, cheap project that could potentially help save the entire Earth from annihilation than a museum about a rockin' sex-fest? The latter doesn't really seem up most of congress' alley, but yet they vote that way.

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.

Re:What?

[ggpauly]

From TFA:

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."

Re:What?

[oni]

If a house has five rooms, and after throughly searching one of the rooms you find two spiders, it's a reasonable guess that there are 10 spiders in the house. This is based on the assumption that the room you searched isn't "Jesus's magical spider room" but is in fact an average, typical room. The average number of spiders per room might be a little higher or a little lower than the one room you searched, but it wont be off by far. It's very unlikely that there are 100 spiders in all the other rooms, for example.

We know what area of the sky has been throughly searched for asteroids. QED.

Intelligence Test for Homo Spaiens...!

[flajann]

Intelligence Test for the human race:

What do you choose to spend your money on?

1. Political campaigns?
2. Corporate Welfare?
3. World Hegemony?
4. Homeland InSecurity?
5. Search and Tracking for Near Earth Objects?

Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?

It was nice knowing us!

Re:Maybe

[ILuvRamen]

they based it on the rate at which we find new ones compared to the volume of space and some other stuff. So it's a pretty good estimation. To estimate we found "all of them" we'd have to have not found any for like 500 years or something.

Re:oh, that old thing?

[Sperbels]

I don't know if you're serious or not but I've seen enough of people who actually think that a collision could be kept secret that I'll reply. Even if the all of the professional astronomers who've calculated the orbit of 2007 TU24 kept their mouths shut, there's still hundreds of amateurs out there who have the capability to measure this object's orbit with enough precision to know whether or not it's going to hit us. You wouldn't be able to get them to keep their mouths shut.