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Space Science

Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out 88

Posted by timothy from the now-we-can-go-back-to-fretting-about-earth dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a followup to previous news noting the possibility that an asteroid would collide with Mars: "Further observations have reduced the odds of asteroid 2007 WD5 impacting Mars to approximately 1 in 10,000. According to NASA this asteroid followed the same pattern of increasing in probability, then finally being ruled out as a threat."
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Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out More

Mars Asteroid Impact Effectively Ruled Out

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  • I'm sure astronomers were really hoping that this would happen. It would have been the scientific event of the decade.
    • What if they did the opposite of what everyone thinks they'll do if a sizeable object is going to hit Earth? What if they detonate a nuke and reroute the asteroid to hit Mars? I think they wouldn't do it because the newspapers would say,"The government is aiming asteroids at planets, are they going to use them as weapons in the future?"

      • Re:What if they caused it to happen? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Megane ( 129182 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @08:20PM (#21993798)
        At this point, even with favorable orbits, and a payload already loaded and ready for launch, you still couldn't get there in time. The fast orbit to Mars still takes six months. The slow orbit takes two years. I don't think they even knew about this event six months ago.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cooley ( 261024 )

        What if they did the opposite of what everyone thinks they'll do if a sizeable object is going to hit Earth? What if they detonate a nuke and reroute the asteroid to hit Mars? I think they wouldn't do it because the newspapers would say,"The government is aiming asteroids at planets, are they going to use them as weapons in the future?"

        Even if we *could* pull that off, why *would* we? Just move the thing out of the way. If there's a tree branch blocking my driving lane, I move it into the ditch (not into oncoming traffic).

      • Why wouldn't you just shoot the nuke at Mars, then?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by misleb ( 129952 )
        What if they send up a team of offshore oil drillers to land on the asteroid and drive around on it and plant the nuke? That would be awesome! You could even make a movie about it... oh wait. They already made that movie. And it sucked. Oh well.
    • In related news, by an odd coincidence, a huge asteroid landed on NASA headquarters and totally obliterated it. Martians everywhere cheered.

  • NEO prediction needs more funding (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @07:14PM (#21993130) Homepage Journal
    Well, actually what it needs is a comp-sci department of a major university to take it on as a research project and apply for many many government grants for super-computer time. Simulating a chaotic system is never easy, but failure to calculate the orbit of a large NEO could be catastrophic.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hsdpa ( 1049926 ) *
      Imagine the Beowulf-cluster needed to do that...

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The limiting factor is observation, not computation.

  • What a shame! (Score:5, Funny)

    by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @07:17PM (#21993170) Homepage
    I guess there's not going to be a Mars-Shattering KABOOM! And I was so looking forward to it.

  • This sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Grishnakh ( 216268 ) on Thursday January 10, 2008 @07:22PM (#21993216)
    A big-ass asteroid hitting our nearest planetary neighbor and causing massive damage would have been a good wake-up call to humanity. The only thing that would have been better would have been a big-ass asteroid smacking the Moon, leaving a crater large enough to see with the naked eye from Earth.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 )
      Nah, that'd be worse. At least one astrophysicist would say that this is what the he Moon is for and you'd have the media repeating it and eventually everyone would believe the earth is immune to NEO.s.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teslar ( 706653 )
      A wake-up call to what, exactly? We're all gonna die burning asteroid death (maybe)?

      See, I really don't get this argument. I can understand a wake-up call about how we're messing with nature so much it's gonna end in tears. I can understand wake-up calls about poverty, misery, illness, all these things in our world. These are things we can at least try to do something about and the more people actually do, the better they may get. Or not, that's a different debate, but the point is that the world is chok

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 )
        People who actually have any experience with these things know that there is something we could do, if we detect a collision early enough. The problem is that we don't yet have a program to do that.. because getting money for these things is all politics.

        So yes, just like the environment or poverty or (formally) disease, whether or not an extinction event is allowed to occur is entirely up to the politicians. A wake-up call is needed for them to justify the expense.

        • Again, 1 in a kajillion chance.

          Moving an asteroid off course would seem likely to require huge nuclear warheads in any case. Obviously, we can't wait until we see something headed towards us in a telescope to start refining uranium or whatever the hell, so we'd have to produce those huge warheads in advance.

          So if the options are (a) have some gigaton warheads sitting around in a bunker Just In Case or (b) hope we don't get hit, I'm thinking (b) is by far the SAFER option, because there's probably a

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by cdrguru ( 88047 )
            I'm going to try really hard not to use a lot of adjectives to describe your thinking on this.

            Are you nuts? Nuclear warheads? That is probably the absolute very last thing you would want to try to deflect a large body with. It might fracture, which would make problems much much worse.

            You see, the problem with lots of little rocks entering the atmosphere is a little detail called "atmospheric heating". Rocks get warm, transfer their heat to the air. A few rocks, no problem. Lots and lots of little rock

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by QuantumG ( 50515 )
              no, see, this retard still thinks that "sufficient lead time" means "2 or 3 days". That's why he's talking about nuclear weapons. He's a product of Hollywood.

            • All it takes is a little push, or as previously alluded to, some paint to absorb solar radiation differently. No nuclear warheads. Maybe an Orion-type or NERVA propulsion system to get out that far.

              We don't need gigaton nukes to deflect asteroids. A simple megaton one like the ones we already have stockpiled in huge quantities will do just fine. And as for fracturing, that's simple: you detonate the nuke a distance away from the asteroid, so that you push it instead of fracture it.

              Of course, if you detect

          • Re:This sucks. (Score:4, Informative)

            by canadian_right ( 410687 ) <alexander.russell@telus.net> on Thursday January 10, 2008 @10:30PM (#21994804) Homepage

            Moving an asteroid is MUCH easier than solving poverty, crime or homelessness. If you have enough lead time it takes a relatively small rocket attached to the asteroid to steer it clear of the earth. A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force! [umich.edu] Another simple proposal. [technovelgy.com]

            On the other hand, there is already enough food for everyone on the whole planet, but human greed, for both wealth and power, prevents a huge number of people from enjoying peace and prosperity. And no amount of technical or political knowledge is going to help.

            In short, it is a very low chance event with very bad results that we CAN do something about.

            • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

              by hcdejong ( 561314 )
              A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force!

              Paper beats rock, then? We already knew that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shimmer ( 3036 )
        Hey, wake up!

        The chances of a large asteroid impact in your lifetime are MUCH HIGHER than you think. The Earth is currently a "single point of failure" for humanity. We have the ability (and the obligation) to detect and escape such impacts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fweeky ( 41046 )

        I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it.
        Detected early enough, you can push a future impactor away from its course with a couple of buckets of paint. You just need to invest some insignificant sum into projects like Spaceguard so you can do something about it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by crankyspice ( 63953 )

        A wake-up call to a 1 in a 1000000000000000000000000000000 chance of a piece of rock hitting us? I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it.

        Two words: Bruce Willis.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by syousef ( 465911 )
        A wake-up call to a 1 in a 1000000000000000000000000000000 chance of a piece of rock hitting us?

        Ignoring the threat is asinine. Your statement of the odds shows a clear misunderstanding of the reality.

        The odds are exactly 100% that we'll get hit. It's just a matter of timing. Yes the chances you'll get hit in your lifetime are slim (though you've added too many zeros). If you don't give a damn about the human race surviving, you should skip the rest of this message.

        If you think I'm exaggerating, plenty of s

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by teslar ( 706653 )

          Your statement of the odds shows a clear misunderstanding of the reality.

          Never attribute to misunderstanding to reality what can adequately be explained by repeated bashing of keys for effect. However - no offense intended, but your statement of exactly 100% is also misunderstanding reality. On top of my head, I can think of three scenarios where earth will never get hit by an asteroid without us actively preventing such an event:

          • Earth is destroyed through other means beforehand
          • The Universe runs out of

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ihlosi ( 895663 )
            And while these (especially No 3) seem pretty remote possibilites,



            Actually, we can be pretty sure that No 1 will happen at some point (when solar luminosity has increased enough to boil the oceans off the surface of Earth), but that's still over a billion years off. No 2 is pretty unlikely. The solar system is just too full of all kinds of rocks. No 3 is hard to predict due to the sheer number of objects in the solar system that all interact gravitationally.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by syousef ( 465911 )
            . On top of my head, I can think of three scenarios where earth will never get hit by an asteroid without us actively preventing such an event:

            Your 3 scenarios are so statistically unlikely, you may as well go out and buy a lotto ticket.

            I speak as someone who has a masters degree in astronomy (but I did the degree for myself, I've never used it professionally). You're speaking as someone who chooses to hold your hands over your ears and yell lalalalala at the top of your voice while sticking your head in a
      • "A wake-up call to a 1 in a 1000000000000000000000000000000 chance of a piece of rock hitting us? I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it."

        Actually, the probability that the Earth will be hit by an asteroid which would be large enough to devastate continents, change the environment, and generally completely wreck the ecosphere is close enough to 1 that it doesn't matter. It'll happen, eventually, unless proactive detection-and-deflection measures are taken -- and we
    • Rendezvous with Rama [wikipedia.org] has a particulary stunning description of an asteroid hitting earth on its first pages (which can be seen here [amazon.com] in Amazon). The book as a whole is fantastic, but i always found that snippet very powerful and visual. In the book, it triggers the creation of an near-earth object monitoring system which sets the events for the rest of the story.

      I agree, maybe we need such a wake-up call.
      • I agree, maybe we need such a wake-up call.

        After reading many of these other comments on this supposedly "news for nerds" site, I'm thinking that it'd be better if we were just hit with a planet-killer asteroid and wiped out.
    • Forget the crater, it's all about the impact flash.
    • Actually, an asteroid impact on the Moon that was large enough to leave a naked-eye-visible crater would be disastrous. Something like that would produce a tremendous amount of ejecta (shrapnel) and a lot of it would be blasted out with enough velocity to reach Earth. It'd be in small pieces so I doubt much would reach the ground, but say goodbye to our satellite fleet.

      Besides, this is all kind of backwards. Asteroid impacts are very rare, so the lack of an impact in this case is a wake-up call to those who
      • Actually, an asteroid impact on the Moon that was large enough to leave a naked-eye-visible crater would be disastrous. Something like that would produce a tremendous amount of ejecta (shrapnel) and a lot of it would be blasted out with enough velocity to reach Earth. It'd be in small pieces so I doubt much would reach the ground, but say goodbye to our satellite fleet.

        That's ok. Satellites can be (relatively) easily replaced, and that'd be even more of a wake-up call.

        Besides, this is all kind of backwards
        • "Too bad it hit some remote tundra instead of a populated city"? Exactly what are your intentions here? It's a good thing it missed a populated city! Not that a hit on a populated city was particularly likely - there's an awful lot more remote tundra, empty ocean, unpopulated desert, etc. than there is cityscape on Earth.
          • "Too bad it hit some remote tundra instead of a populated city"? Exactly what are your intentions here? It's a good thing it missed a populated city!

            Perhaps. I'm just thinking, darkly, after reading all these idiotic replies here on this thread, that that's about the only way to get humanity to wake up. I should probably just be realistic and realize that humanity is doomed. We probably only have 50-100 years left before we destroy ourselves because of greed and stupidity.
    • I don't know much about science or astronomy but I would have thought if something is heading on a course for the moon, wouldn't it be more likely the earths stronger gravitational field would have grabbed it?
      • I guess it depends on exactly what its course is, in relation to the earth's and the moon's at that time. With all those variables, and the large distances involved, that's probably why astronomers have a bit of difficulty predicting with 100% accuracy whether a not an asteroid is going to hit a body, or just have a very close miss.
  • "would" is wrong "might", maybe. Would suggests a very high probability. The previous postings hinted at 1 in 75 and that has now been downgraded to 1 in 30k.

    How can we mock USA Today when so-called geeks are so poor at handling numbers.

  • ... that the asteroid uses the metric system ?
  • Now the question is where is it going? Relatively speaking, it's rather cramped in space around there, so we may have to see what Mars' does to its trajectory before we know where else it could go. Hopefully it'll hit something not-earth (or moon).
  • Anyone living in a southern coastal state should be familiar with this pattern.

    When a hurricane is first spotted heading our way, its usually too far out to have any idea where its going to end up. As it keeps heading our way, the likelihood of a strike gets higher and higher. When we're in the 5-day cone, we start making rushes for the store. When we're in the 3-day cone, we put up shutters. Then, a day before, the cone narrows to the point that we see its going far enough South or West that we're n

    • The major difference being that hurricanes behave chaotically and can make a sudden 90 degree turn at the last moment. Even if you're outside the 24-hour cone, you should keep your shutters up until the thing hits.

      Asteroids don't generally change course unpredictably.

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