Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040 143
dryriver writes with a report from CNN that the asteroid known as 2011 AG5 will not hit Earth in 2040 as early calculations had led some to fear when it was first spotted last year. "To narrow down the asteroid's future course, NASA put out a call for more observation. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa took up the task and managed to observe the asteroid over several days in October. 'An analysis of the new data conducted by NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the risk of collision in 2040 has been eliminated,' NASA declared Friday."
Do we want to know? (Score:1)
Re:Do we want to know? (Score:5, Informative)
It has a diameter of about 140 meters. Its not a planet killer.
You watch too much TV. Nobody can keep a secret in this world. Not least of all, government officials.
Re:Do we want to know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it'd have a large local/regional impact, but not planet-wide. Estimates of the impact seem to hover around 100-150 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is 2-3 Tsar Bombas [wikipedia.org].
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If it lands in the same spot as the Tsar Bomba, it would damage things in Norway. IIRC, there were a few shattered windows in Norway from the Tsar Bomba. Nevermind that. The blew that thing up in a very remote area. If it hit London... wow, just wow. Not a global killer; but certainly a global game changer.
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Yeah, it'd have a large local/regional impact, but not planet-wide. Estimates of the impact seem to hover around 100-150 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is 2-3 Tsar Bombas [wikipedia.org].
Meeza thinkin' if da asteroid iz like a bomba, it be doing plenty of kabloohee!
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I'm going to break the rules and feed a troll here by replying with a very simple sentiment: Go fuck yourself, asshole. Some things aren't fit to joke about. Also, next time you decide to try to be funny, at least get it straight: the region is known as the Mid-Atlantic. Have a nice day, prick.
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Re:Do we want to know? (Score:5, Funny)
Last post!
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Yes, since even with current technology it might be feasible to avoid the collision if we know its trajectory decades in advance. For example, if a probe flies close to the asteroid, the gravitational pull of the probe will alter the path of the asteroid a tiny bit, but a tiny bit can be enough if it happens a long time before the asteroid gets too close to earth.
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5km isn't enough to "significantly slow down (and disperse)" such a large volume of material. The impact area is still too localised, even though the object is shattered. More than that, the range of conventional "high velocity" firearms isn't enough to reach the asteroid at 5km. And even if it was, your 1 million shooters would all have to be directly under the "dispersal" zone. They'd be vaporised.
If you could shatter it fine enough at a sufficient distance - multiple Earth-moon distances - so that the sp
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you morons can rationalize anything can't you
luckily the rest of the world knows how rediculous your empire is
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"Rediculous"? The entire world knows you're illiterate troll.
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thanks for the plug... moron
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I believe Humans and Mammals are the dominant life form primarily due to our ability to withstand cataclysmic events like that.
It's why dinosaurs died out and mammals took over.
Except that toward the end of the Permian, "proto-mammals" that were in most ways a great deal like modern mammals were the dominant form of animal life on land. And then something happened to cause the worst mass extinction event in the planet's history ... which cleared the way for the dinosaurs and reduced mammals to a small niche for almost 200 million years. What class of creatures end up winning looks like a roll of the dice as much as anything,
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maybe the dinosaurs ate all the mammals?
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It is and it isn't a roll of the dice. Whether or not a creature is already adapted for the radically different conditions that occur during a mass extinction is pretty much random. They can't plan ahead, because evolution doesn't work that way. They haven't spent millions of years adapting for conditions that don't yet exist, they've adapted for the conditions that do exist. Then suddenly the rug is pulled out from under them when the Earth's environment changes en masse. So, when the disaster happens
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Fair enough. That's why I said "class" instead of "species"; obviously you can predict that in the event of a major extinction event, smaller animals will tend to do better than larger ones, but you can't predict that, say, mammals will do better than reptiles, without looking at the traits of particular animals within each group. My original point, apparently not too well phrased, was that it's silly to say "mammals are more adaptable than other animals" when we're judging from a sample size of two: one
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Most people don't want to know, and some shouldn't even be told if the Earth was about to be obliterated by a comet or very large asteroid.
But you can rest assured, sooner or later something will come at us and impact the planet. It's happened before, it'll happen again
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Forgot to carry the one?
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Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? (Score:2)
Well....
That all depends.
I hear the North Koreans are planning to land thrusters on it and propel it into the imperial bourgeois West...
Re: Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? (Score:1)
Re: Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? (Score:5, Interesting)
But maybe u think we could just hollywood like blow everything up and thats it?
In fact this is a realistic option with an asteroid this small. Its only 140 meters, or a football field and a half in diameter.
Shattering it into much smaller fragments is actually an option, as only some of those would still hit earth, and many of those would be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. Most that don't burn up, would (statically at least) hit ocean.
Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
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Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
Impact modelling apparently says rubble-pile asteroids are harder to break up than solids.
But they will also have a large amount of their mass as dust/sand/gravel. If you can spread it out, it will burn up above 50km, only the large solid masses will impact. But we need to do proper asteroid missions on members of multiple asteroid families. Too many unknowns.
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Most asteroids, from what we know, are loose accumulations of space debris without a solid core. It might shatter rather easily.
What does the nuclear bomb modeling show?
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Actually it's probably the nuke modelling that I'm remembering. The problem is that loose piles can shift internally to absorb energy, without actually breaking up. Bean bags. (Perhaps how they they are able to accumulate in the first place.)
IIRC, there was a method for breaking them up with a realistic number of nukes, but you had to detonate the bombs below the surface. (Lots of pop.sci giggling at the time about how the movie "Armageddon" actually got something right.)
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Ideally, you would blow it up a LONG way away, not point blank.
It gives the fragments much longer to drift out of conflict.
Nobody would have a clear idea if which country was going to be ground zero.
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theoretical physics, as little as I understand, leads me to believe by looking for them we are actively inviting them to hit us.
Its clear you understand little.
But I'd be interested in how one sends an invitation to a 140 meter ball of rock.
Will it RSVP?
Re: Asteroid 2011 AG5 Will Miss Earth In 2040??? (Score:1)
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I still think we should blow this sucker up, just to make sure we can if the time comes. To me "exploding into tiny hopefully harmless pieces" has less modes of failure than "attach rocket and try to nudge."
You must be young. Those of us who grew up in the 80s know that when you blow up an asteroid, you don't get tiny harmless pieces; you get small fast-moving pieces that are just as deadly as the original rock and much harder to hit.
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It's about being hit by bird-shot rather than a deer-slug. Both are bad, but only one is survivable. Reducing a resurfacing event to a mere extinction event, or an extinction event to a civilisation killer, or a civilisation killer to a large natural disaster.
If we can reduce the severity, there's a greater chance we can take measures to preserve the species, and the knowledge of our civilisation. One week in a suburban bunker vs six months. Or a year in a large government nuclear shelter, vs... no chance s
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You got one part right: at the point of blowing it up, the total momentum is conserved. You then fail to understand the full physical picture. Each space rock, regardless of size, loses a lot of material due to compressive heating as it enters the atmosphere. If you have one large rock, ablating, say, 1cm deep leaves a pretty large chunk to hit the earth's surface. If a few hundred small rocks each lose 1cm to ablation, there's almost nothing left to hit the surface.
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Wow. Three replies and all of them took me seriously. Is 43 too young to turn into a grumpy old man?
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Although, processing said raw materials into usable product is another story.
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Yes, people have calculated it. Depending on how far out you are, it can be enough to paint the asteroid white.
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BMO
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That's to give a potential impactor enough delta-v to miss the planet.
Both Frosty and asm2750's proposals require taking a non-impactor and giving it enough delta-v to hit Earth or go into HEO. That would likely require a lot more delta-v, and vastly more control, than the impact-avoidance scenarios.
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But that's wrong.
Delta v can be applied in any case with white paint for either capture or avoidance. It's all the same math.
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BMO
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The difference between an object hitting Earth and one that just barely misses might be a few tens of metres per second, if you catch it early enough. But the difference between the orbit of the best suitable asteroid and a successful impact (or capture) could be anything up to kilometres per second.
Worse, any miss is a good miss. Whether it scrapes the atmosphere, or swings wide of the moon, it's all good. A hit, otoh, requires aching levels of accuracy. If a million states are called a "miss" but just one
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Delta V is Delta V and whether it is applied with white paint, ion thrusters, chemical rockets, gravity, etc, makes no difference if the magnitude and direction is the correct amount for capture or mere avoidance.
Your thinking is too narrow. You are hung up on whether the application is high-tech enough, when the technology doesn't matter except for cost.
Seriously.
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BMO
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You are hung up on whether the application is high-tech enough,
[Sigh] Try reading what I actually wrote. Missing and hitting are not symmetrical situations.
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>[Sigh] Try reading what I actually wrote
I did.
You are hung up on the technology when all this is really just a lot of math called "orbital mechanics" and whether you use the gravity well of Jupiter or the gloved hand of an astronaut giving a sufficient shove (because the further out you are, the less of a shove you need) makes not one bit of difference if the vector is correct.
Missing and hitting are all the same situations with the same math.
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BMO
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No you clearly didn't. I explained how the two are not comparable. Twice. This is attempt three.
An object on a collision course with Earth may require only the slightest nudge to send it off-course enough to miss, a few tens of metres per second. Small amount of force.
But if you want to target something into Earth (or into a Lagrange capture), you are not starting with an asteroid that is in a convenient orbit that is just a few tens of metres per second away from a perfect intercept. Instead you will have
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>you are not starting with an asteroid that is in a convenient orbit that is just a few tens of metres per second away from a perfect intercept.
Really?
REALLY?
This is the basis for your dispute with me? You rule out asteroids that may be convenient, and then say it's going to be difficult to delta-v something?
Go away.
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BMO
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Furthermore, I find your signature/tagline most ironic since you can't see that the math for missing and hitting is all the same except for the tolerances for the resulting answer. The algorithms are identical.
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BMO
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Because why?
2038 (Score:2, Funny)
It wouldn't matter. Time ends some time in 2038 when the 32 bit signed time value overflows.
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If there was any wisdom the Mayans passed down to us, it was that clocks and calendars do not control time.
But just in case, we are all switching to 64bit clocks.
Re: 2038 (Score:1)
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I totally just heard about this the other day. Wonder if it'll blow by like nothing like y2k or actually have bad effects. From what I read the choices are watch everything die, convince closed source proprietary apps to restart development and switch to 64 bit, or force it to be unsigned and break many functions that add or subtract time. Is this right?
Thankfully such things are being done by engineers and scientists and not politicians.
If they was made by politicians they would wait until the last day to recognize it and start acting like they was really busy trying to solve it at 23:45 and then they would pass the deadline.
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Maybe pass is the wrong word to use?
Maybe I should say fail instead. I mean go over the deadline.
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That was 86, not 99.
Yeah, but I'd much rather listen to 99's voice...
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Good work, NASA (Score:3)
You know how much government and private sector money you could had got if you tried to do a "white lie" like saying that it could hit, and even could be a planet killer? Everyone would want to have a working colony in mars or self-sustaining orbital colonies by 2020, if not before. It could had been a lie for the greater good.
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"muslim and other religious guided idiots"
that statement is definitely insulting, off topic and uncalled for
(a) equating muslims with religious idiots is promoting a dangerous stereotype. Especially unfair as a lot of observations in astronomy are thanks to them (their work, their translations and open mindedness toward science)
(b) even if you do not believe in any religion you have no more proof that believers of any religion are better guided than atheist... there are a many misguided atheists as well. Yo
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The statement might be insulting, but I'm quite sure it is true - I'm not trying to be politically correct on Slashdot.
(a) Vast majority of muslims are religious idiots. From pools conducted in muslim countries, non trivial portion of people support terrorism, al-Qaeda, or bin Laden ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_attitudes_towards_terrorism#Recent_polls [wikipedia.org] ). That are normal people, not a few fundamentalist idiots that
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For sale: End of the World 2040 Survival Kits . . (Score:4, Funny)
. . . only slightly used in 2012 . . .
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Man, I'm barely two decades old and I've lived through dozens of predicted doomsdays. September 6, 1994 - the world did not end. July 1999 - the world did not end. All of the 2000 predictions, from apocalyptic Y2K bugs to Jerry Falwell, were wrong. Nibiru did not hit the Earth in 2003, probably because it doesn't exist. 6/6/2006 was unremarkable except for an abnormal number of heavy metal album releases. The Large Hadron Collider did not destroy the planet, although it did find the Higgs Boson. May 21 2011
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Doomsdays and End of the Worlds are excellent business opportunities. Disgruntled old COBOL programmers made fortunes off Y2K. The same thing will happen with disgruntled old C programmers in 2038.
This latest Mayan astrological huff featured End of the World package tours to the Mayan ruins, and Survive the End of the World Shelters. Given any catastrophe, or even faux catastrophe, someone will try to make a buck off it. And there are enough idiots who will spend money on anything, not matter how worth
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>Why not tell a little white lie that this asteroid will hit earth in 2040
Because after we spend $TRILLIONS on the mission, and the conspiracy is revealed, when the real thing comes along, people won't believe it. It's tough enough convincing people to evacuate a barrier island before a hurricane or to get Mr. Truman away from Mt. St. Helens before the eruption.
Also
>assuming such a secret can be kept
General Petraeus couldn't even keep his affair secret and he was an intelligence expert. This is why
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what politician cares about what happens after they retire from politics? its someone else's problem
Incentives. (Score:2)
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great idea... if you're luke skywalker
Irrelevant post end of the world event (Score:2)
Why do we care? The end of the world was two days ago, and now we have ceased to be, I do not see the point of this post
By the way, how was the end of the world for you? Did you have a nice weather?
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By the way, how was the end of the world for you? Did you have a nice weather?
Yes, the weather was fine, about the same as here in the much hyped afterlife which, IMO, seems highly overrated.
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afterlife which, IMO, seems highly overrated.
Very true. Death did not even release me from back pain. How disapointing!
Damn! (Score:4, Funny)
So just how long do we have to wait for this "doomsday" thing?
I'm going to have to spend Christmas catching up on two months' chores that I've been skipping.
But in fact: (Score:2)
that's what they want you to think.
They wouldn't want anyone getting wind of their TS/SAR plans for a giant rocket to get all the politicians and Wall St. Bankers off the planet in 2039.
Oh well... (Score:2)
Another Earth-ending apocalypse avoided! I am so disappointed.