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Space Science

Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth 476

Posted by CowboyNeal from the greatest-near-hits dept.
lmcl writes "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre. The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."
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Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth More

Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth

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  • That Explains It. (Score:4, Funny)

    by TPIRman ( 142895 ) * on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:36AM (#7121123)
    I thought I felt something.
  • First the Indian one then this. A mere coincidence or perhaps the remnants or a relatively recent asteroid collision?
    • Both of them were were on the 27'th [bbc.co.uk] One hit the earth, the other didn't. I'm guessing something along the lines of the cloud of a shattered asteroid / comet. To have those two events occur litteraly within hours of each other is hard to dismiss as a coincidence.

      I would also note that the Indian event also appears to have consisted of at least two pieces (one of which is said to have done minor damage in a different village). I'm guessing that there are more pieces out there (smaller, perhaps, but out there).

    • Re:that's two in a few days (Score:5, Informative)

      by epiphani ( 254981 ) <epiphani@@@dal...net> on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:06AM (#7121303)
      Well, in the grand scale of things, asteroids are going to increase dramatically in the next little while. When I say next little while, I mean the next 50 million years.

      We're entering a phase where our system is moving back into the galatic disk in our solar system. In fact, we're closer to the middle of the galactic disk now than we have been for about 70 million years.

      Think of it this way - as we whip around in the arms of the milky way, we also move up and down in them. I wonder if an attempt at ascii art would help explain...

      ------+++------ - Milky Way
      ^- Us

      We accually move back and forth from the top of the dash to the bottom of the dash. Comprende? So we're now moving into the more dense part of the disk, so we'll see more asteroids. Coincedence that the last time we were here the dinosaurs mysteriously vanished? I think not.

      Now, one the size of a small house could do some decent damage. Assume that a small house is about 15 meters in diameter. An asteroid about 100 meters in diameter hit siberia in 1908 [uga.edu] and flattened 2000 Square Miles of forest. These things aint big, but they do good damage.

      • They actually proved on a discovery channel special that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a 10 degree (Celcius) increase in global temperatures that was initially caused by gasses being released from the bottom of the ocean floor. Sorry, I don't have a link. It was an excellent program though! :D

      • Re:that's two in a few days (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @03:10AM (#7121751)
        That's a pretty poor article actually. Thousands of "earth-orbital" asteroids? I think not.

        It's also pretty clear that whatever happened in Tunguska Siberia wasn't an asteroid and consensus was that it was most likely a small comet. There's no "big hole in the ground" and no debris (other than some microparticles in the trees which may be related), thus no "big rock." There was a shockwave from the object vaporizing completely in the atmosphere, but no actual impact.It's true that what it was isn't certain (and likely never will be) and some still hold out for an asteroid, but they're in the distinct minority. For the asteroid hypothesis to prevail someone has to show how a really big rock can just go "poof" when we know that littler ones don't ( such as the one that just struck in India).

        http://www.galisteo.com/tunguska/docs/tmpt.html

        You'll find a true asteroid/meteor crater clearly
        displayed in Arizona. That's what getting hit by a rock looks like. Over 30 million tons of meteoric debris has been collected from around the crater.It was a fairly small rock too, as space rocks go.

        http://www.barringercrater.com/

        You'll find a rather less clearly displayed impact crater in the Yucatan.

        http://www.azstarnet.com/clips/signs_of_life_day 1b .html

        The author of the article was a "science editor," not a scientist.It clearly shows, as do the works of most science editors who are trained in journalism, not science, little, if any, actual understanding about the science she is writing about.

        KFG
        • For the asteroid hypothesis to prevail someone has to show how a really big rock can just go "poof" when we know that littler ones don't ( such as the one that just struck in India).

          A Russian scientist did, however, reproduce a blast pattern identical to the one on the ground by building a scale model of the terrain and sliding a small explosive down a wire. Detonating at different heights/speeds/angles made several different patterns, among them the same "butterfly".

          Until someone can generate/model the

      • EH? - Where'd you get your information from??? (Score:5, Informative)

        by reality-bytes ( 119275 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @07:09AM (#7122404) Homepage
        The Sun (and solar system) last crossed the plane of the Galaxy 2 million years ago and we are currently in the thick of the particulate dust which is held near the plane.

        However, the sun is presently located about 50 light-years above the central plane of the galaxy and is currently moving away from the plane of the Milky Way at 7km a second. It is estimated that it will take 14 million years for the gravitational pull of the Galaxy to stop our outward motion and begin to bring us back in.

        Unless the Solar system is about to dissipate 7km/second worth of velocity and do an about face and the travel at 100 times the speed of light back to the plane, we won't be back there any time soon.

        I think what you were trying to describe is the Earth's path through the Solar system. We will be passing back through the path of the ecliptic which is in effect the 'plane' of the Solar system where the majority of small hard rock type objects reside.

        This is, of course, at the system level of motion rather than the galactic level.


        We are here:-
        Approx 28,000ly from galaxy centre on the 'Orion' arm.
        Approx 50ly from mean plane of galaxy
        Approx speed relative to galaxy centre: 200km a second.

  • Possibly related (Score:5, Informative)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:38AM (#7121129) Journal
    a few days ago APOD had posted this picture [nasa.gov]. If this picture was taken recently, maybe the asteroid and the fireball are related.

    • Re:Possibly related (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Galvatron ( 115029 ) *
      Well, the asteroid is clearly WAY out of the atmosphere, so it wouldn't make a fireball like that. I suppose it's possible that a smaller chunk broke off or something.

  • *twitch* (Score:3, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:39AM (#7121130) Homepage
    The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by.

    I think I speak for all of us when I say:

    Gah.

    • Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:44AM (#7121168) Homepage
      Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, I really doubt that we could stop an asteroid large enough to do a lot of damage. Assuming that to be the case, wouldn't you want to it to be unexpected rather than knowing when it would happen. Would you really want to know the exact date and time of your death?

      • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

        by arcite ( 661011 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:54AM (#7121228)
        How else would I know when to begin the rabid orgy of drinking, sex, and general debauchery?

        • Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)

          by richie2000 ( 159732 )
          How else would I know when to begin the rabid orgy of drinking, sex, and general debauchery?

          Why wait? You already know you're going to die within the next 100 years. That's not too long for a rabid orgy, is it? Are you saying that you can't take more than 80 years of rabid orgy? 70, even? Pathetic.

        • Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)

          by Sgt_Jake ( 659140 )
          How else would I know when to begin the rabid orgy of drinking, sex, and general debauchery?

          ...college.

      • What about Museums? (Score:5, Funny)

        by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMikeNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:54AM (#7121230) Journal
        When an asteroid does strike the earth and wipes us all out, and some future intelligent creature fills our niche, what will they think when they excavate our natural history museums and find dinosaur bones?

        I like to think that they'll figure a few dinosaurs did survive and lived in grand buildings as the rulers of all mankind.

      • Seriously, it is ultimately a matter of very basic physics. In space especially, it is pretty easy to predict the trajectory of a known object for a great distance into the future. With the velocities and distances involved, a tiny nudge to any object months in advance would mean a trajectory change of hundreds of thousands to millions of miles. A thermonuclear charge at a few months away and no worries, even for a *big* rock. Now if the thing is just days away, that is a totally different story, but we cou
        • This is very hollywood of you. We _might_ be able to lessen the damage (by re-directing the object). We might be able to break it up (as you pointed out, but that might make matters worse).. Pointing a large object into the ocean might be _worse_ that actually letting it hit land! Anyways, to the point... We have to _know_ well ahead of time that the object is headed our way.. And without doubt. With very large objects, that might not be a problem. However, we are not talking about a dozen o
      • it's about means to detect. With a reasonble timeframe, it's possible. AS it is, it'll be sheer luck if we detect it before impact, and even if we do we've hardly got much more than ICBMs that could be launch-ready in time, trying to take it out head on. We're not going to have X months to build ships and train oil riggers. And the ICBMs, well... depends on the size. Against a "reasonably" sized target they can make a difference. Against a real big rock? Very little. And they'll probably turn one huge impac

        • Re:Mostly it's not about means to stop... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:59AM (#7121527) Journal
          An ICBM? You've got no imagination. Johndale Solem, in his paper "Nuclear Explosive Propelled Interceptor for Deflecting Objects on Collision Course with Earth", proposes deflecting the asteroid with a warheadless craft, propelled by 2.5kt nuclear bombs. The kinetic energy of the resulting collision would deflect the asteroid away from Earth.

          And if you miss, just launch another one. A well designed interceptor should be able to intercept an asteroid one week before armageddon, in just six hours.
      • I think the idea is to go find a priest to perform last rites...
      • Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems moving an asteroid in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut it up into six pieces and pile it all together.

        Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?

        Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in deep space for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up asteroid will look like curry to a pisshead. You need at least sixteen hundred pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through an asteroid that weighs 10 tons in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked asteroid every minute. Hence the expression, 'as greedy as a pig.'

      • Re:Really? (Score:3, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 )
        Hollywood would have you believe that any car that has all of its wheels leave the ground blows up while in midair.

        This tends to make me distrust Hollywood as a source of physical phenomenon.

        Maybe it's just me?

        KFG

      • Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Stephen Samuel ( 106962 )
        Given that the last really big rock we found was predicted to have it's close encounter something like 15 years from now, let's see:

        $ units 2inches/second miles/15years
        * 14941.726

        So imparting a delta-V of 2inches/second perpendicular to it's path would be enough to deflect the rock by more than the diameter of earth....

        units 1million-miles/14years miles/hour
        * 8.1485395

        so 8 miles/hour would be enough to give us a 1,000,000 mile comfort zone in 14 years.... What more do you want? (Btw: if we were

    • Re:*twitch* (Score:3, Funny)

      by phraktyl ( 92649 ) *
      Not for me you don't! My first thought was:

      Feh.

  • Damn (Score:3, Funny)

    by TLouden ( 677335 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:39AM (#7121133)
    should have got my giant shotgun out to try and shoot it. Next time.

  • She said... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:39AM (#7121134)
    She said "did you just feel the earth move?" - I thought I was good in bed.

    But it was just an asteroid.

  • Big Deal (Score:2, Funny)

    by dnahelix ( 598670 )
    "What's everyone so worked up about? So there's a comet -- big deal. It'll burn up in our atmosphere and what's ever left will be no bigger than a chihuahua's head." -HS

  • Thank god... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pVoid ( 607584 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:43AM (#7121160)
    and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by

    Thank god it was spotted after the fact, or else we would have had another stupid media frenzy that would draw attention away from more important matters, like friggin this [google.com], this [bayarea.com], or this [google.com]. Media man, it's like a toy for an ADD child.

  • I'm reminded of the Red Dwarf episode where Lester plays pool with several planets. You know, one of these days the player is going to sink this shot.

  • closest asteroid ever? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ee_moss ( 635165 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:43AM (#7121165)
    The previous record for closest approach of an asteroid - 108,000km measured from the centre of the Earth - was set in 1994 by another 10m object named 1994 XM1.

    I heard the record for the closest approach of an asteroid was already set billions of years ago. Apparantly everything died or some freak catastrophe like that. Doesn't that still hold the world record?

    • Re:closest asteroid ever? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Malor ( 3658 )
      <pedant>
      As far as I know, it's an asteroid until it hits atmosphere, a meteor until it hits the ground, and a meteorite after that.

      In other words, there has *never* been an asteroid strike on earth.
      </pedant>

      (and I can just imagine a pair of dinosaurs arguing about what to call the really, really big rock in the sky. Be a great Far Side. :-) )
      • Actually, it's a meteoroid until it hits the atmosphere, a meteor in the sky, and a meteorite after that.

        Asteroids are "large" rocks in space, with a poor distinction on what's "large" and what's not. It's unclear whether or not an object is a meteoroid or an asteroid, and unclear as to whether an asteroid entering Earth's atmosphere would be a meteor (then again, we'd be screaming for help, so it wouldn't much matter).

      • Re:closest asteroid ever? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:36AM (#7121431) Homepage Journal
        Ehhh, not quite, IIRC. Little rocks are meteoroids while they're floating around in space, meteors while they're in the atmosphere, and meteorites if and when they land. But asteroids are, of course Big Rocks (anyone know what the lower size limit is?) and I don't think that having them enter the Earth's atmosphere is a common enough occurrence for anyone to have come up for different terminology based on where they are in their descent ...

  • homeless now (Score:3, Funny)

    by Omega037 ( 712939 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:45AM (#7121172)
    actually it was a small house, mine. thats right I lived in space...or at least I used to.

  • so... (Score:2, Funny)

    by thunderbird46 ( 315436 )
    How many VW Beetle size units does it take to get a small-house-size asteroid? :)

  • Closest, hah! (Score:5, Informative)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) * on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:46AM (#7121177)
    The ones that were closer were the ones like the recent one that hit Orissa. This wasn't even the closest one that could do any damage, it was too small to have even survived the atmosphere. That recent one in Wales which was recorded by the skateboarder -- that was about 80,000 kilometers closer.

    Sheesh.
  • shooting rocks at us again.
  • We have evidence for quite a few asteroids hitting
    Earth in the past. WTF is up with headline?

  • Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMikeNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:50AM (#7121206) Journal
    Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth

    Er-Um-I don't think so. Plenty of Asteroids have struck the Earth, and those are the degenerate case of "closest".

    Did you really mean "Closest Asteroid of Significant Size since Hollywood Made Some Movies Recently About Asteroids Hitting the Earth and Wiping Out Humanity Yet Flies Past Earth"?

    • Okay, how about "of all the asteroids that flew past Earth, this one was the closest"?
      • How can you possibly make that assertion? Since an asteroid that misses leaves no evidence, who knows how close they've come in the past.

        The best we can say is that this is the closest "recorded" near-miss.
        • How can you possibly make that assertion? Since an asteroid that misses leaves no evidence, who knows how close they've come in the past.

          It's like the security goon that got up and said, (in front of senior management, no less) "We have never had an undetected break-in on our network."

          The room sat in stunned silence for a moment... (Kinda like that AFLAC commercial with Yogi Berra. You've seen it if you watch baseball.)

  • The Sky Is Falling! (Score:3, Funny)

    by toxic666 ( 529648 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:51AM (#7121211)
    Dear Rich Friend:

    I am a research scientist in Nigeria. I have access to important information that will save the world, but need seed money to bring my theories to the scientific world.

    Send me research money or the world will end! Do it quick so I can send up Bruce Willis in a shuttle to Save the Baby Seals and all the other earthlings. If you send me enough research money, I'll tell you how to mine killer asteroids for Ni, Fe, Pt, Pd and Dilithium.

    Please keep our transactions confidential so we may share in this opportunity to save humanity and get rich.
  • I bet there are a few Dinosaurs that would dispute that "Closest"
    tag, if they weren't all dead.

  • When it rains. . . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @12:55AM (#7121236)
    Four actual impacts since May, an unverified fifth impact, plus sky flames and now this latest item. And that's just the reported stuff.

    Link-O-Rama. . .

    Oakland County [detnews.com] [detnews.com] [detnews.com]

    Mount Vernon [komotv.com] [komotv.com] [komotv.com]

    English garden, (possible). [thisislincolnshire.co.uk] [thisislincolnshire.co.uk] [thisislincolnshire.co.uk]

    New Orleans [nola.com] [nola.com] [nola.com]

    And of course, India [abc.net.au] [abc.net.au] [abc.net.au] two days ago.

    Fireball. [bbc.co.uk]


    About 4 or 5 years ago there was a bit of noise around the scientific community about a mysterious very big object being detected around the vicinity of Pluto's orbit. An object travelling on an eliptical orbit around the sun which had been predicted by numerous astronomers trying to explain anomolies in the orbits of the various planets in the solar system. As the object came to its closest point a few years back, a bunch of disinfo was thrown up to distract the public. --Calming bullshit reports on the various 'Learning Channels', plus a bunch of culty nonsense from the 'Planet X' contingent. All horseshit designed to keep the public quiet or confused while the global elite prepared for the approaching calamity, (and for which they seem to think the proper preparation includes building a one-world government, killing a ton of people, and managing the whole affair from underground. Or some Dr. Strangegloves nonsense to that effect. Either way, nonsense stories clouded the issue with almost perfect success. --Including the interestingly sudden reassurances (which I never heard when I was a kid), from governments and government owned media that, "No, No. Rocks are constantly falling into the atmosphere. This is all perfectly normal." --Well sure, stuff is always falling, but there are certain scales of averages which are being ignored here. . .)

    Works like this. . .

    Basically, every 3600 years we go through a cloud of rocks, and every 360,000 years, that cluster is replenished thanks to said big object, (a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun), which passes through the Kuiper belt and knocks new debris down to the Earth's orbital plane. The last year or so of comet stories and such were, I suspect, elements of the old cluster, and now we're beginning to see the first arrivals from the new one.

    The pattern expected is that it will be like a rain shower. A few drops here and there as it begins. Then a short pause where everybody half-relaxes. Then the downpour.

    Should be interesting, to say the least! --Espeically in conjunction with the dozen or so other massive things going on. So much to do, so little time!

    Keep alert, folks! You don't get to experience stuff like this every lifetime!


    -FL

    • Re:When it rains. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Soko ( 17987 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:16AM (#7121348) Homepage
      You are, I think, speaking of the Nemesis Theory [exn.ca] which is just that - a theory, yet to be proven.

      Actually, IIRC there's been some recent evidence that casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory, but can't seem to locate the link(s) at present. Google for more, of course.

      Soko
      • You are, I think, speaking of the Nemesis Theory which is just that - a theory, yet to be proven.

        Actually, IIRC there's been some recent evidence that casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory [. . .]

        Well, the 'serious doubts' I've seen cast have all had the ear mark of the desperate. But you're right. The Nemesis Theory and similar have not been officially proven, nor will they be, (the halls of officialdom being what they are). The point of the matter, though, is that people have known thi
    • You can take this tenth planet [badastronomy.com] and stick it where the sun don't shine.

    • Re:When it rains. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BrianH ( 13460 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @02:57AM (#7121716)
      (a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun)

      25 years ago this theory may have been worth spending time on, but technology has done a pretty good job of ruling it out since then (nothing is impossible, but its presence is highly unlikely).

      The theory that a brown dwarf or Uranus to Jupiterian-sized planet could be orbiting beyond Pluto in a slow or elliptical orbit invisible to ground based visible light scopes is believable, but astronomy has moved well beyond visible light. We've scanned the sky in X-Ray, infrared, radio, and gamma ray, and haven't found ANYTHING resembling another planet or nearby star. Planets, especially gas giants, tend to be noisy and easily visible by radio, and ALL planetary bodies have some kind of infrared signature. If there were anything out there of any appreciable size, we'd have seen some sign of it by now.
    • I'm inclined to believe this. The likelihood of a meteorite hitting anything human is extremely small - we only occupy a small fraction of the surface of the earth. When we have meteorites hitting houses, gardens and parking lots all of a sudden, I am wondering if I should pull out the statistics books and start doing an analysis to show whether this is variation or something bigger.
  • It's nice of them to tell us this AFTER the fact! I could have spent MONTHS fretting and freaking out.

    Just think of all the partying I could have done thinking the world was going to end.

    Oh well, gotta go. Work starts at 8...

  • Hell. (Score:3, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) * <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:02AM (#7121273) Journal
    I finally have a good reason to have pooed myself, and nothing on board.

    Damn you random chance! I'll get you next time.

    ....IF THERE IS A NEXT TIME!??!?!?!!!!???

  • Radius of Earth ~6000km. Distance of closest approach of asteroid 88000 km. (Is that from the surface or center? I'll assume center.) Ratio of distances is approx 1:15, so the ratio of areas is 1:225.

    Translation: To a first approximation, we can have about 200 asteroids come this close or closer before one hits us - so it wasn't a particularly close call.

    To a second approximation, it gets a bit more complicated. The Earth's gravity deflects asteroids towards the center of the Earth, and so an asteroid tha
  • The article says this is not connected to the India meteor. How can this not be related? There were way too many interesting meteor events last weekend.

    This is very interesting ...

    - September 27 [google.com] - A meteor hits Eastern India, catching some homes on fire and injuring at least three people. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often.

    - September 28 [google.com] - A post to rec.arts.sf.fandom reported a "rather impressive meteor" with "lots of bits breaking off".

    - (the week before) October 1 [nasa.gov] - Astronomy Picture of t
    • Maybe there are a series of asteroids for a reason. Maybe the meteorites and asteroids we're seeing lately are just the small rocks that are preceding a large rock.

      Maybe the big one is bearing down on us even as we speak.

    • Completly random and un-connected events are bound to coincide sometimes.

      Much like the Cancer Hot Spots in the US.
      Statistically if cancer is totally random you will have hotspots of cancer. And the quantity of so called hotspots matches what is to be expected.

      Have you ever rolled doubles twice in a row in Monopoly?
      Were you like, How can this not be related?

  • While I appreciate the geek factor of the space program as much as the next guy, I sometimes struggle to understand the value of it. It seems this is great justification. Sometime in the next few hundred years, we'll quite possibly be in trouble with an asteroid, and unless we start playing around in space now we'll never be ready with a solution to stop it.

    Let's just hope we have another decade or two to get ready before a big one is going to hit.
  • Should we call this a near hit, or a near miss? I'm confused little child.
  • asteroid about the size of a small house
    How big is that is VW Beetles?

    Come on people, use the right units!

  • OK, who thinks 10meters across is a "SMALL HOUSE"? More like the size of a Van than a small house.
    • Yes because many fans are 30ft long. Wait, they're only 17-21'? Damn that changes everything. A small house can be 30 feet across. Hell my room isn't even 30 feet across but it's as wide as most houses my friends live in.

  • 2003 SQ222 details (Score:4, Informative)

    by jafuser ( 112236 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @01:22AM (#7121372)
    Pictures and details here:
    http://www.birtwhi.demon.co.uk/Gallery2003SQ222.ht m [demon.co.uk]

  • One asteroid the size of a couch DID NOT pass closely by, but entered the the atmosphere [nasa.gov]
  • "The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from inside the Earth's orbit and so was only spotted after it had whizzed by."

    Fortunately for us, scientists are more worried about negative press [slashdot.org] than they are by near miss killer asteroids. Not that they would want to raise awareness [slashdot.org] and get something done about them. I mean, don't want the world too worried about being wiped out. That's bad publicity.
  • A house? Well, that thar rock would ha made a real fireball.
  • There were other (smaller) asteroids which made closest possible approaches. Such as the one which is known as the 'The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball of Wyoming' in local folklore. More details here...

    http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/1972.html

    This one missed terra firma by just 58 Km, close enough to create sonic booms, but not close enough to hit the earth.
  • The blurb states: "...closest approach of a natural object ever recorded..."

    This village [slashdot.org] replies: "Yeah, right."
  • must be the only person on earth who wished that sucker hit us.
  • "New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre.

    Although this seems quite close by astronomical standards, it's still not really all that close - when you realize that Geosynchronous orbit is approximately three Earth Diameters out there, then it becomes clear that

  • Not closest - Grand Teton, 1972 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by B.D.Mills ( 18626 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @02:49AM (#7121698)
    80,000 km is not the closest. How about the Grand Teton Meteor [amsmeteors.org] of 1972? This one was seen in the US and Canada as a bright daylight fireball. It was very close - about 50 km - but did not hit. Instead, it burned through the atmosphere and went off back into space.

    Then there's this one [floridatoday.com], which is believed to be a meteor that was put into Earth orbit on the first pass, then re-entered 100 minutes later after orbiting the Earth once.

  • Reminder (Score:3)

    by xihr ( 556141 ) on Friday October 03, 2003 @03:20AM (#7121773) Homepage

    Let's keep in mind that such an asteroid striking the atmosphere would do very little damage other than a spectacular lightshow. This kind of thing happens all the time; don't let the recent media hype over the recent asteroid probabilities (which were all well under the background probability anyway!) lead you astray. Without comprehensive programs, it's inevitable that the geometry of orbital mechanics means we'll tend to find these near-misses after, not before they hit, anyway.

    It's kind of strange to see the media labeling this as the nearest miss so far. When, uh, lots of asteroids, huge, big, medium-sized, small, and dust-sized have hit in the past.

  • Math (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nicodemus05 ( 688301 ) <nicodemus05@hotmail.com> on Friday October 03, 2003 @08:48AM (#7122810)
    After thinking about the ramifications of the numbers, it's amazing that this is the closest recorded near-miss on record. The surface traced by an object 88,000,000 meters from Earth's center is a sphere of volume 2.855x10^18 M^3. The volume of the Earth (given a radius of 6.38x10^6) is 1.089x10^12 M^3. Assuming that the volume of the asteroid is zero (it is in fact approximately 4000 m^3), the chances of it colliding with the Earth are 1 in 250,000 (V_Earth/V_surface). (I don't know how to account for the volume of the asteroid. If it were 4000 asteroids of 1 meter volume you could get a better approximation by multiplying my answer by 4000, but that implies randomly placed, independent objects as opposed to one rock.)

    I assume (based on this article [arizona.edu]) that we've been watching the skies for 100 years, and that this has been the closest pass in that time. That means that any give year we have a 1 in 25,000,000 chance of an impact.

    Based on this simple history [whyfiles.org] it's apparent that there have been 2 impacts of similarly sized asteroids in the past 500 years. Either A) my impact probability is off by 5 orders of magnitude or B) this has been a quiet century for near-misses. That kind of statistical variation is unlikely, so what's wrong with my numbers?

    Assuming that we've only been able to accurately record near-misses for 20 years drops my probability of impact to 1 in 5 million. Based on that answer there should have been 1/10000th of an impact in the past 500 years. My answer is still off by 4 orders of magnitude. Assuming independent asteroids of 1m volume I go down to 1 order of magnitude error.

    I'm going to keep thinking about it, but I have to do a problem set now. I'm interested if anyone sees a flaw in my logic or math, or simply has comments.

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