Asteroid Will Make Close Pass To Earth 119
The Bad Astronomer writes "News is starting to spread about a small 45-meter-wide asteroid called 2012 DA14 that will make a close pass to Earth on February 15, 2013. However, some of these articles are claiming it has 'a good chance' of impacting the Earth. This is simply incorrect; the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero. Farther in the future the odds are unclear; another near pass may occur in 2020, but right now the uncertainties in the asteroid's orbit are too large to know much about that. More observations of DA14 are being made, and we should have better information about future encounters soon."
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Not this time, the article says it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit. Even if it does impact intact, the worst the damage could be would be comparable to the Tunguska event.
Depending on location, it could be very bad, but not an extinction event. You are right though, if it was bigger, we would be screwed. Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
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If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
But it isn't. The chance of anything important being hit is almost nil, while defending from asteroids is extremely expensive. It just isn't cost-effective.
Cost effective?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it does hit, maybe it will convince those with the cash that asteroid defense is a worthwhile expense.
But it isn't. The chance of anything important being hit is almost nil, while defending from asteroids is extremely expensive. It just isn't cost-effective.
Just look at our wars on "Terror" and "Drugs". Do you honestly think cost effectiveness is ever considered?
Now defending from asteroids won't be politically feasible until we actually get hit by one - when people can actually see it and experience the impact, death and destruction. Some millions of years old crater in a desert is nothing.
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War on Terror is happening for completely different reason. War on Drugs is fictional, there is no way, there is only lame attempts of making impression that the war is happening.
War on drugs would be real if American drones would be regularly whacking nacrobarons.
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Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble is, a single rocket with a single nuke isn't likely enough to fix a civilization-destroying rock.
Also, given the choice between practically any expenditure and world civilization, of course it's worthwhile. But by the time we get that choice, it's too late to do anything. At the moment, it's something like "building and maintaining a rocket with a nuke" for "1 in a million annual risk to global civilization".-- you can't just say that such a rock is eventually inevitable, because asteroid defense isn't something you buy once and put on the shelf in addition to the upkeep and periodic replacement of weapons, there's the cost of a concerted monitoring program to detect a threat early enough and with an accurate enough orbital solution that the gentle tap of a nuke will eliminate the risk.
It's not easy to come up with actual numbers, but once you factor in the possibility (IMO likelihood) that civilization may well end long before such an impact, it would not be entirely surprising to find that it's actually economically saner to hope for the best than to make preparations.
(It's analogous to a civilian in low-crime areas considering the purchasing and wearing Type III body armor -- the cost, discomfort, and hassle of wearing it for a day is certainly less expensive than dying from a rifle shot, but the odds of ever encountering such a situation are so low it's not worthwhile.)
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
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Trouble is, a single rocket with a single nuke isn't likely enough to fix a civilization-destroying rock.
Any particular reason why it should be that way?
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I suspect you like watching things blow up, but that's not really the wisest choice here. Much better would be an impactor with very high mass - perhaps a depleted uranium core - and low relative velocity: slow enough to contact the asteroid without shattering it and massive enough to nudge its trajectory and keep nudging it for a while. Post-contact booster rockets might help further. It's not something you launch in the eleventh hour, though.
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Anything that massive would suck all countries GDP for the next 100 years to get into orbit.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Informative)
Touching/Landing on asteroids is difficult because they have very complicated structures and rotations. The best way to deflect an asteroid is not by nukes or what you suggest, but by spraying it white (solar radiation pressure) or parking a mass (e.g. 1t) with a ion drive next to it.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-deflect-asteroid.html [physorg.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid-impact_avoidance#Collision_avoidance_strategies [wikipedia.org]
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In my defense I mentioned your second choice. I don't think I'd want the job for the first one... Bruce Willis as an industrial painter in a space suit?
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You used the word contact, and I mean "next to it" in the sense that they are not in contact (gravitational pull only). But I think we just need to try it on some test asteroid -- e.g. to bring it into an orbit around the earth.
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I'd volunteer. Appropriate industrial experience ; plenty of remote site operations experience ; no undue concerns about radiation.
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I suspect you like watching things blow up
I do, but that's not the point. If it has any chance to cause global extinction due to its size, you can't make it explode with a nuke of a reasonable size. You can, however, nudge it with the explosion. Perhaps a contact explosion is not desirable, but you should still be able to press on an area of tens of thousands of square meters for a few seconds with a pressure sufficient to outmatch that heavy slow impactor. True, the lack of atmosphere doesn't help here, but perhaps some additional inert mass aroun
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In the truth TPTB/PHB haven't considered any options. They'll delay and deny and in the end attempt solutions that consider only their own little close circle and to hell with the rest of us.
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Not even Bruce Willis could save us with one year notice.
But how about Juan Carlos?
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it is expected to pass between us and Geostationary orbit
With a bit of luck it will clean out a few dead satellites on the way
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45 meters? (Score:2)
Would any of that thing even reach the ground before burning out during atmospheric entry?
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IANAA (Astrophysicist), but I believe asteroids of that size would reach the earth. Depending what it's made of, it could break into a lot of pieces, though.
This is a pretty small asteroid and (again, I'm no expert) but its orbit means that it wouldn't have a great relative velocity if it did strike earth (nothing like a comet, by comparison). There were some estimates on the damage it would do if it were to strike in the referenced article and this doesn't seem to be a major concern.
Re:45 meters? (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you think of this [wikipedia.org] ?
It was made made by a 45 meter impactor.
Yes, A 45 METER IMPACTOR.
Re:45 meters? (Score:4, Funny)
See, meteorites create tourist attractions. The larger the crater the bigger the cash flow. Meteorite impacts are good for the economy.
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Yes, depending what it is made of. Check out this one at the American Museum of Natural History:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2189/2106429655_9edb74118a.jpg [flickr.com]
The Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to 10.3 meters of water in mass per area. Re-entry heating gets split between the meteorite and the air it is traveling through. When the meteorite mass per area is higher than the equivalent mass per area of the atmosphere, it tends to not pick up enough heat to melt entirely or drag to stop. Asteroid density va
Re:45 meters? (Score:4, Informative)
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So does that mean it was about 50 meters across in space, or about 50 meters across when it slammed into the earth?
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Want to see more? (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing more and more reports of near passes. Frigging Bugs must be out of target practice and are homing in on us! Get NPH!
Re:Want to see more? (Score:5, Funny)
Service guarantees citizenship
Re:Want to see more? (Score:5, Funny)
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You have to sign up before you get to read the contract...
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Agreed.
I think it's safe to assume they have always been there, we are just better at spotting them.
the question becomes how many are we still not seeing?
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> ...the question becomes how many are we still not seeing?
Part of the purpose of the surveys is to answer that: not by finding them all but by acquiring enough data to use statistics to estimate the number unfound.
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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don't know we don't know. - Donald Rumsfeld (Maybe meteors are what he was talking about? :)
Of course it won't hit us (Score:5, Funny)
The world ends toward the end of this year, duh! Of course the chance of hitting the Earth is 0%, because we won't be here!
Re:Of course it won't hit us (Score:5, Funny)
I think you misunderstand the disaster that's coming. When the Mayan calendar ends, all computers that use the Mayan calendar will crash, world-wide. Worse yet, unlike Y2K, where we were able to drag old Cobol programmers out of retirement to fix the problem, experts in Mayan computers are all extinct. So we're all doomed! Except for those of us who don't use Mayan computers. :)
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No, that isn't it. The disaster will be all the TV shows predicting disaster will go away, I love those. Worse, Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair will expand to the size of small planet and then catch on fire. It will be a holocaust of immense proportions. I'm looking forward to a gonzo-whopper of a End-O-the-Hair Moronic Convergence.
Mayans (Score:1)
I'm sure someone (not me) will re-analyze the Mayan calendar and show that it's a couple months off..and Mayan doomsday is actually scheduled for 15 Feb 2013.
BTW, the location of the Chicxulub crater is at the northern edge of Maya-land, although the only Mayans around then were dinosaurs.
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There have been around 514 leap years since it was created around 45 BC. Without the extra days every 4 years and all the adjustments that needed to be done to figure out leap years in the early days plus the Gregorian reform, today would be somewhere in the realm of July or August of 2013. So the 2012 thing should have happened several months ago.
Big sky, little rock (Score:1)
The odds of any individual item hitting us are (pardon me) astoromically small. Even if it did have a "good chance" of hitting us, that would mean maybe 1% at this point. Obviosly rocks have hit earth before, and rocks will hit earth again, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Re:Big sky, little rock (Score:5, Funny)
JPL impact risk table (Score:5, Informative)
TFA contains a link to an predicted impact table [nasa.gov] of DA14 with earth, going some 50 years into the future. The likelihood of each impact is rather small, and the cumulative probability of any impact is computed as 2.2e-04 (about 1 in 5000 - not alarming, but not exactly negligible IMO).
Here's what I don't understand: the first entry in the chart, corresponding to the next risk event, is in the year 2020. What happened to Feb 2013?
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Mm, yes the reality is that our ability to discover and track these rocks is pretty limited. Our civilisation could be destroyed tomorrow and the first thing anyone would know about it would be when their clothes lit on fire.
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Since we can predict the next (2013) close approach very accurately we're very confident it will be a miss. Therefore that approach doesn't rate a mention in the table.
The trouble comes in that, while we know the 2013 approach distance will be greater than 0km from the surface (>6400km from the centre) there's still some uncertainty. The earth is massive and the close approach will cause a relatively large change in the orbit of DA14. The size of the change is inversely proportional to the square of t
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Provided the asteroid's mass is much smaller than the Earth's--which it is, unless it's made of neutronium--then its deflection does not significantly depend on its mass.
It's not "simply incorrect" (Score:2, Interesting)
Whether the asteroid has a "good chance" of hitting the earth depends on how you define "good chance," which does not have an accepted standard definition.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
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If it hit the ocean anywhere near land, it would still cause significant devastation. In "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a much larger object struck the Pacific Ocean - IIRC a mile in diameter. At 30,000 MPH relative, about 8.3 miles per second, that large object went through the depth of the Pacific in something less than one second, vaporizing cubic miles of water and causing a tsunami a couple thousand feet high, striking LA and washing over the mountains into the Central Valley.
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[...] causing a tsunami a couple thousand feet high, striking LA and washing over the mountains into the Central Valley.
LA could use a good hosing down.
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Oh no! A 45 meter space rock might hit us, and it might mean the end of the world, even though we're about 26,000 mi in diameter and it will probably burn up in the atmosphere! And of course, we all know when someone throws a pebble at a person, that person EXPLODES! WE ARE ALL DOOM-ED!
Looks like someone skipped class that day the high school physics teacher went over kinetic energy.
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even though we're about 26,000 mi in diameter
Who are *we* ?
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Your mom. Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
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No, we're nowhere near 26k miles in diameter. Not even obese Americans.
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Yeah, everyone knows a tiny piece of metal can't do any damage no matter how fast it's moving...
pfffffff..... (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, it's such a tease. It's like a hot girl waving at you at a bar, and then you realize she's waving at a guy behind you.
I say enough with the tease. No more close passes. Either hit this, or go away.
Misleading Article Title (Score:3)
Asteroid Will Make Close Pass To Earth != "the odds of an impact next year are essentially zero"
Re:Let's get this to scale... (Score:4, Insightful)
45 meters? (Score:2)
About those odds... (Score:2)
NASA places the odds at 99.9988% chance of a miss. That is almost, but not quite, 5-nines. With all the downtime I've seen from companies promising 5-nines of reliability and failing, I'm more than a little skeptical.
This will get more common (Score:2)
The number of asteroids passing close to the Earth has not changed recently, but the number we know about has increased dramatically. The current statistics are around 8700 known NEO's, which is double what we knew about 5.5 years ago, 4 times that of 9.5 years ago, and 10 times that of 12.5 years ago. Therefore the number of *known* close passes will continue to go up.
In the silver lining department, the more NEO's we know about, the more chances for space mining, and the better chance we have of prevent
Even if it did hit (Score:2)
45m would be roughly comparable to Tunguska. It could completely fuck up a large metropolitan area, but only with a direct hit on land. Otherwise all you get is a sizeable earthquake and possibly a tsunami, which sucks, but is nothing we haven't seen several times in the last decade.
The point is that it would be a big explosion, but even at its most devastating it wouldn't come close to an extinction event.
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If it hit the ocean the equivalent volume of water would be displaced, and quite a bit of it would be vaporized. So I would argue that the result would be a significant tsunami (bigger than Japan? I don't know) and a change in the weather for a year or two.
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Someone in an earlier comment pointed out that the Barringer Crater was thought to have been made by a rock about 55 meters in diameter. I was extrapolating from that. That crater is substantially bigger than anything humans have managed including fusion bombs. But It's an arguable point, especially since I'm too lazy to do any of the math. :)
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Fusion bombs have (almost) all been air-bursts or fully contained underground tests, and for good reason: the 100-kiloton Sedan [wikipedia.org] nuclear excavation test of Operation Plowshare [wikipedia.org] was responsible for 7% of all radioactive contamination from US nuclear testing.
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I just saw a picture of the concrete dome built over a Cactus Crater [artificialowl.net] recently ( this is a different picture). That dome is 107m (390 feet) in diameter. The Castle Bravo test left a crater over a mile (2000 meters) in diameter and 250 feet (75 meters) deep. I also found this article [rense.com] that notes that some of the nuclear tests caused tsunamis hundreds of miles away on Christmas and Pitcairn islands. Some of those tests were as 'small' as 16 kilotons. But a 1996 analysis said that tsunamis from underwater
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Not a risk (Score:2)
Isn't There A Game About This? (Score:2)
I stand corrected... (Score:1)
PSA (Score:2)
Attention all non-scientists:
Watching the movie Armageddon does NOT make you a fucking expert in the subject of Near-Earth Asteroids. Like the newer article on the site has indicated, you know nothing about the subject and are incapable of even recognizing those who do.
It's an attack. (Score:1)
Call it by it's name. (Score:2)
There's a movie script in there (Score:2)
on the premise that we have accurately predicted a large asteroid impact on Earth in a decade from now. Film follows the effect this has on people all over the world, from the time of the announcement to the impact itself. From those who don't believe, to those who look forward to it or see it as the holy Armageddon they've been waiting for. The scary thing is many Christians do look forward to that!
Would make an interesting film I think.
What? (Score:2)
Are you kidding me? The MOON is almost 400,000 km away. A massive, dangerous object passing within 3,000 km isn't "close"? To a planet that's 13,000 km in diameter? This asteroid will be within SPITTING distance of Earth.
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