Latest Earth-Crossing Asteroid Passes by Tonight 69
jc42 writes "Astronomers have been looking at the first images of asteroid 2007 TU24, the 250-meter asteroid that will pass 540,000 km from the Earth at 8:33 UTC (3:30 EST) Tuesday morning. So get your telescopes out; it's a 10th-magnitude object. Or just hold your breath as the time approaches. It might be sobering to consider that it was just discovered last October, and we know about maybe half of the objects like this in Earth-crossing orbits."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
What? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't really get what you're asking - we can determine about how many there should be. And apparently about half of those we are aware of. In another example, it would be naïve to assume we know about all the stars in the universe. We know what we can see, and can figure out how many there should be.
Currently we know about half of them [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
No, your analogy is terrible. Since this is Slashdot, what we really need in order to properly visualize this is a bad car analogy, thusly:
Let's say you're walking down a standard neighborhood street, and you count 5 cars parked on the side of the road. With this information, you can easily extrapolate out that if there are 50 other streets in your neighborhood, there must be 250 cars in the neighborhood that you haven't yet seen. Cars that you see actually moving down the street are just chaotic side effects of the car phenomenon, and can safely be discarded from the analysis.
Or, perhaps a more accurate, but still poor, car analogy: If scientists have scanned half the sky at random, and have discovered around 5,000 cars hurtling toward Earth, they can reasonably state that there are probably around 10,000 cars hurtling toward Earth at any given moment. However, even if they're completely wrong, it's probably best to keep an eye out for falling cars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
MAYBE half (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Oh no, it IS used to transmit FUD and lies for sure. Just that it is not "magical" in nature, that was my point. As it turns out, it is also not operated on tube based methodology.
Just FYI.
Re: (Score:1)
Nah. It was more fun to talk about rooms with spiders. But what if the room is actually the inside of a timecube?
One MILLION Dollars! (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA needs to spearhead projects that are useful, in collaboration with the rest of the space-viewing world. The fact that there isn't a loud voice shouting about this concept to the pols is embarrassing.
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
But I'm way to high right now to even consider it.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What makes you think this isn't already happening? NASA already does this. On the national level, the US has the Near Earth Object [nasa.gov] program headed out of NASA's JPL. The Spaceguard Foundation [wikipedia.org] acts on the international level.
NASA has a fair number of other projects that are immediately "useful", as oppose
Re: (Score:2)
Getting lucky (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
NASA is also funding Orbit@Home (Score:2)
http://orbit.psi.edu/ [psi.edu]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Total cost of the project is around 400 Million. The two donations above will fund three of the scope's main mirrors. Observations are ex
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then say something like "roughly 40 Earth diameters", which is something you can picture. Or maybe, "Imagine that the Earth were the size of an orange, this would be like a randomly fired bullet coming within thirteen feet of it."
If you wanted to make a point, you could say, "It's like living in a safe neighborhood that's a couple a blocks away from a street where there are regular drive by shootings, then h
Re: (Score:1)
( ( pi * ( earthradius ^ 2 ) ) / ( pi * ( (540000 km + earthradius) ^ 2 ) ) ) / 5 = 0.000027193886039087225468
That's a hit by something this size every 3676 years.
Ha ha! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Methinks you might want to consider first who it was that missed you.
Outside lunar orbit (Score:2)
A quick Google says that lunar orbit is about 385 MM (mega meters), and this is 540 MM. (Why don't we use megameters when we're rounding to the nearest 1000 km? We have all these nice metric units; let's use them!)
Re: (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megametre [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Same thing for 1,000 kilowatt-hours, that is 1 megawatt hour.
oh, that old thing? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't hold your breath. (Score:3, Informative)
Don't bother holding your breath. At magnitude 10.3 it's too dim to see without a telescope to gather extra light. By a factor of 50 or so (even on a clear dark sky).
Intelligence Test for Homo Spaiens...! (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you choose to spend your money on?
Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?
It was nice knowing us!
Re:Intelligence Test for Homo Spaiens...! (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitim_event [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Mediterranean_Event [wikipedia.org]
The first occurred in rural Russia, just like Tunguska, but the second one was in the Mediterranean, and had about the same power as the Nagasaki bomb (double Hiroshima). It could have easily struck a little to the north and hit highly populated Europe, or to the east and hit India/Pakistan, touching off a nuclear war there.
So far, we're failing the Civilization Intelligence Test in a really big way.
We ahve had no warnings (Score:2)
To say we have had 'warnings' implies there is some cosmic goat trying to tell us something. There is not, there is only a group of animals aware enough to consider long term and far away events and how they impacts us.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
"We're running out of booze money- NO no no! I mean, there's a huge asteroid coming and it's going to KILL US ALL! We NEED FUNDS!"
After receiving the funds:
"Oh, it just passes by 500 000km away, you can barely see it, don't bother to check."
Re: (Score:2)
We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event.
Most of the earth has little or no population, and it's no surprise that Tunguska didn't strike a highly populated area.
We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks.
Jupiter is much bigger and has a greater chance of attracting space objects. Really big strikes on Earth are extremely rare. You're talking on the order of 1 in a million.
It was nice knowing us!
It's more likely will kill ourselves with our own technology than via an asteroid strike.
Then what? (Score:1)
Where will it be? (Score:2)
Reasons I won't be getting the telescope out (Score:2, Informative)
I did catch an asteroid once, and it was kinda cool. Using a map of the asteroid's path, I set up the scope on some recognizable stars and waited for it. It looked like a faint speck moving against the background. Not sure it's worth the t
Last Train (Score:2)
And here I was hoping (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
some tu24 releated comedy (Score:1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_Y6L9-VmK8 [youtube.com]
and the obvious corrections to it
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/01/21/repeat-after-me-asteroid-2007-tu24-is-no-danger-to-earth/ [badastronomy.com]