Asteroid To Pass Near Earth On Monday 183
TigerNut writes "Asteroid 2011 MD was discovered on June 22 by LINEAR, and its flight path will take it within 8000 miles (12000 km) of Earth. Orbital predictions indicate that its flight path will be significantly altered by this close approach."
Re:Should we worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm even more amazed that we could accurately detect and track an object of this size.
Re:Sure thing (Score:3, Insightful)
...of the asteroids that we know about...
Re:Don't underestimate the energy of small asteroi (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting hit in the upper arm by a spec of sand might not hurt you, a human, but it would be devastating to a colony of microbes living on your arm in that spot.
Re:Cars? Houses? Pets? People? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, it is so small that it wouldn't even hit the earth, so the entire analogy is goofy.
If the asteroid did strike, it would probably explode in the upper atmosphere — a fine spectacle, but harmless.
An asteroid would have to be thousands of feet to create a nuclear winter. I'm sure it could be reasonably smaller and still destroy all life on Earth. The one that may have wiped out the dinosaurs was apparently about 42,000 feet. Whatever it was that hit Tunguska is suspected to have been a couple hundred feet. The asteroids expected to pass near earth this century We have one about 1,000 feet coming in 2029 that (if it hit) would be 65,000 times more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima.
Worrying about something so small as this is just silly and, frankly, anything that won't wipe out an entire city is fairly insignificant, as far as I'm concerned. I'm thinking about the real threats out there that we couldn't give a shit about, because our society is more concerned with having a pothole filled than a disaster averted (or they're all too busy eagerly hoping for Armageddon, so their goofy prophecies can be "fulfilled").
I punched in what numbers I could find on this object and if it were to hit the earth, it would be "barely audible" even within one mile (5dB). The object has to be significantly larger to even form a crater of any kind. All you'll end up with are small fragments that hit all over an area. I suck at math, but I suspect that with as little of the Earth that is actual land mass and then the even smaller percentage of that which is populated, the odds of even one fragment hitting a populated area are extremely small. It's not like a 25ft or 50ft object is going to hit and burst into fragments directly over a metro area. (I mean, possible, sure, but extremely unlikely).
Here, you can punch in numbers on this and other objects hitting earth, yourself: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/ [ic.ac.uk]
I only really played around with porous and dense objects hitting earth; not a body of water. The couple quick checks I did on it hitting water (depending on depth, of course) show that it would have to hit really close to shore (within a few miles) to have any real impact on the shoreline.
Re:Don't underestimate the energy of small asteroi (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course that's what they said.
Consider this. If they *know* it's going to hit the Earth, and even estimate about where it will hit, there are three choices.
1) Tell the truth and say "It's going to hit here at this time, with the effective energy of X atomic bombs" (I love that SI unit). People will panic. You wouldn't get any sort or orderly evacuation. Imagine if it were to hit near a metro area in the US. Millions of people would be displaced, even if it's only temporary. Now, what if they were off by a couple hundred miles? Aw shit, sorry guys, we were wrong. You evacuated to the impact site. Doesn't matter much, since you're dead.
2) STFU and don't say anything. Always a good choice, except amateur astronomers will likely spot it too. Again, when that makes the news, there will be mass panic, and an abundance of bad intelligence on the impact location, strength, etc.
3) Say "Don't worry, it'll miss us." If that ends up being true, there is no mass panic. No evacuations. No looting, robbing, raping, or pillaging. Life goes on as boring as ever. If it does hit, they can say "Oops, sorry". I'm sure that would be accompanied with a detailed explanation of how they were unable to calculate for some unknown like a freak solar flare or something.
As someone else pointed out, they said it'll miss by about 12,000 kilometers. That sounds safe until you consider that the distance from the Earth to the Moon averages about 384,000 kilometers. Or how about this, the object is going to pass through Geostationary Orbit (GEO) twice (once coming, once going), and at least into Medium Earth Orbit (MEO). It won't be a danger to the ISS, who sits far below that. There are plenty of satellites floating around in MEO and GEO.
It's doubtful an object the size of that asteroid would intersect with a satellite, but it is a risk. That could result in extra space debris, or a rather uncoordinated reentry of a satellite or other "parked" space junk.
So, it's not just going to pass by harmless through empty space. It's going to pass through space where we have a bunch of shit laying around.
Myself, I'm not worried. It's a small rock that has a small risk of hitting the Earth or something close by. I won't discount the possibility that a fast moving rock may hit us very hard and very fast, but if it does, there isn't much we can do about it anyways. If it does hit us an cause an ELE, I'll work on what to do from there. With any luck, it won't crash through the roof of my office, and onto my desk. :)