Small Asteroid Making 400,000 Mile Pass By Earth 157
AtariKee writes "Universe Today is reporting that a small 10m asteroid, discovered earlier this month and named 2009 BD, is passing within 400,000 miles of Earth. Although the asteroid poses no threat to the planet, the site reports that the asteroid is still very interesting, as it may be a rare co-orbital asteroid (as in, shares the same orbit as Earth)."
Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who thinks we should attempt to land on it
Yes! Yes you are.
How do you propose to land on a 10 meter wide asteroid?
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
Very carefully. :)
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
And yet... (Score:2)
...You couldn't land on the M key with your finger just now.
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
With an asteroid that small, it would be debatable whether the ship landed on it, or the other way around...
So I guess you'd have to use a soyuz.
(Get it? Because in soviet russia... Never mind.)
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:4, Funny)
In other words: "We didn't land on the space rock. The space rock landed on us."
(with apologies to Malcolm X)
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(Really, it was hinted at by the GGGP, literally spelled out by the GGP and GP and then thoroughly explained by you... geez...)
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Is "whoosh" appropriate here? I mean, he got the joke. We need like... the opposite of whoosh here.
I'm going to go with the sound of a vacuum cleaner.
MWWUUURRRVROOOOOMnnneeeeyyyuuuUUURVROOOOMneeeeyuuurrrr
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I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters.
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Cut in a few pieces, it might just fit in the cargo fuselage of the Space Shuttle.
Of course, it would be far too much mass to land, and it's way, way outside the Shuttle's range, but it makes the idea of "landing" more like "docking" or "recovering."
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We'll go in Soviet Russia. As we all know, the asteroid will then land on us then.
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If you are interested, there's also information about elephant-eating snakes [peakoil.net]...
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Haven't you ever played Lunar Lander?! The barest pixel to the wrong side, and a tiny bit too fast in any direction and BOOM! Anyone good at Lunar Lander could do this!!!
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Re: someone did (Score:4, Funny)
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Obviously we did already because there's a camera shot from the asteroid of Earth.
That's not a photograph, it's a crappy 3D render.
http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/earth_toutatis_big.gif [universetoday.com]
ob... (Score:2)
That's not a photograph, it's a crappy 3D render.
That's no moon....
(fuck you saw that coming didnt you?)
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Apparently I was not-so-obviously joking.
I think that the fill-in /. reply here is "WHOOSH".
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Why would we do something tricky like 'land on it' when we can send a nuke to 'collide with it' instead?
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The movie Aliens.
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Somewhat more likely, apparently, we may send an aircraft [wikipedia.org] to travel near the asteroid and try to use its small but constant gravitational pull to modify its course.
Re:Let's land on it. (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhat more likely, apparently, we may send an aircraft to travel near the asteroid
If you have to wait for an aircraft to do the job, I think it's probably too late.
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There are good reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Most asteroids are most likely actually just big piles of smaller material. They have very little structural integrity. If you tried to apply a force to one 'spot' on the asteroid the results would be at best unpredictable. Material would shift around, you might even just sort of push through it.
Another related problem is that you need to push against the asteroid THROUGH its center of mass. If that center of mass is not fixed, then you can't really do that.
Beyond that, even if the asteroid is a solid chunk of rock, you still have to despin it before you can push it, thus the whole operation becomes a lot harder, plus if it IS a rubble pile, then you may not even be able to despin it or it would be pretty hard to do so.
A gravity tractor on the other hand suffers none of these disadvantages. All parts of the asteroid are going to be attracted to the tractor. It may STILL be somewhat complicated, but probably less so. In any event we won't really know until we try.
Finally, what difference does it really make how fast you accelerate the asteroid? The point would be to put it on the desired course. Doesn't really matter if the mission is 1 hour long or 10 years as long as you get the results you want.
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Wrap the thing in shrink wrap, or cement it together, or something so that it IS one big solid lump, throw a dozen rockets on it, and fire them when the spin points them in the appropriate direction.
5 km/s!!! hehe (Score:3, Interesting)
The total delta v required to get from Earth to Mars is somewhat under 5 km/s. In order to impart that kind of velocity to an asteroid you would need something like 10 huge nuclear rockets or something (and a small asteroid).
This is why it is important to detect these things well in advance. The delta v required to deflect something that is a year from crashing into Earth is going to be on the order of half the diameter of the Earth in a year. In other words VERY low. A year is really close. Realistically a
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Well, I did pull that number out of the air. The point I was trying to get across is that a gravity tractor would have to work for a long time in order to affect an asteroid, perhaps longer than from detection to impact.
However, now I'm not so sure. I've been playing around with some handy online calculators [ajdesigner.com], in particular this one [ajdesigner.com] which tells you how much acceleration a particular mass will impart on another. A 100 tonne g
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Personally, I would love to capture this one and bring it back to the ISS. 10 meters would be a nice one to bring back and see what is really there.
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Sure, and for THAT we may well be able to do it. There are only meters per second of delta v on those things, and it is a relatively small asteroid.
But there is going to have to be quite a few years of work done to determine the exact nature of these things and how to safely handle them. An emergency to deflect a strike is one thing, but just for sheer science or money it is going to have to be proven low risk first.
And we do know actually a good bit about the general character of asteroids. The profile of
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In that case, rather than deflecting it wouldn't it be possible to scatter it?
Maybe (Score:2)
Chances are there are a few good sized chunks in a big asteroid, BUT maybe it would make sense to get rid of the rest.
Now if we're talking far enough up the tech curve one might contemplate using the gravel for reaction mass to move the big chunks around. But that would be a LOT more technically complex.
In any case I'm not real sure why people worry about it at all. We wouldn't even be able to move this new asteroid as it stands, and it probably wouldn't do much damage anyway unless it smacked down in a fai
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Am I the only one who thinks we should attempt to land on it and stage an emergency scenerio drill
I was thinking that we could land on it, set up tax havens, gambling casinos, brothels and Ponzi schemes.
Think of it as a bubbling-broth mix of Las Vegas, Wall Street and the Cayman Islands.
Now a fun place like that would finally put our galaxy on the interstellar map.
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Personally, I'd rather just screw Liv Tyler and forget the rest.
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Nice idea, but let's try it on an asteroid that's heading somewhere interesting, rather than one that's in the same orbit as the Earth.
Not again! (Score:4, Funny)
Even worse... (Score:2)
Another AC\DC revival.
Mining NEOs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having NEOs in stable orbits around the Earth could be of benefit to mankind in the future as missions can be planned, possibly sending mining missions to these rocky visitors so we can tap their resources.
The Near-Earth-Objects in question are only 10m and 20m in diameter. How would it be of any benefit to us to mine resources from these? Surely it would cost far more in resources to -get- there.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
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Maybe they foresee some future orbital spaceyard where its easier and cheaper to get metal from already orbiting NEOs than it is to send up materials from Earth?
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Are NEOs abundant enough to do that? How many NEOs are even candidates for mining?
Well, to start close to home, there are a few thousand of them orbiting the Earth. There are lots of dead satellites out there, and most are stuffed full of electronics gadgetry. Granted, the chips might not be worth salvaging. But you can always use resistors and capacitors, and there's gotta be a few thousand km of wires that could be collected and added to the parts closets in your orbiting labs. This should be a lot ch
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there's gotta be a few thousand km of wires
The copper thieves probably already got to them :(
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Besides that though, is there even a way to get these minerals down to the Earth reliably and cheaply? I imagine there are reasons large re-entry vehicles carrying hundreds of tons worth of ore would not work.
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Continent sized parachutes, think about it!
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They clearly contain "Bullet-Timeium"
Re:Mining NEOs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
The "exotic" resource would most likely be "every day minerals not stuck in earths gravity well".
It's expensive in terms of energy to lift things into orbit. This stuff is already free of earth's gravity. It _might_ be advantageous someday to mine this stuff if we wanted to make things in orbit.
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Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
Matrixium -- it used to be worth quite a bit, but it has been overmined.
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Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
Might be worth checking for naturally occurring 2(5)6 dilithium 2(:)l diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide.
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There are plenty of larger NEOs that are energetically easy to get to. In fact, there are quite a number that the Apollo spacecraft could have reached and returned from, and there were plans to do this in the late 1960's (using the Saturn V 3rd stage as living quarters in route, and replacing the LEM with provisions), but neither LBJ nor Nixon was really interested in manned exploration beyond the Moon. I have a feeling that JFK would have gone for this, though, as well as for the manned Venus orbiter plan
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Manned Venus orbiter sounds like a good idea, but wouldn't that trip be a few years long? Time to get there plus the time to do the experiments plus time to get back? Unless the people who went on the trip knew it was a one way trip.
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There was a planned manned Venus mission using Apollo technology. It would have been a fly-by, with only a few hours of time near Venus and over a year of travel time for three men. Other than to say we did it, there wasn't much of a point of doing it instead of unmanned probes, which is likely why it got cancelled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_Flyby [wikipedia.org]
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Asteroid mining? (Score:2)
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*Landing an object on an asteroid is neither cheap nor convenient...even a robotic device is difficult. *
Yes, but it has already been done:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa [wikipedia.org]
In fact, Hayabusa wasn't supposed to actually land, but it did, for about 30 minutes. It may have a sample of the asteroid that it is bringing back in 2010, just in time for a re-issue of the Late Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain.
The asteroid was not destroyed by the landing....just like the comet that was hit by a space probe did
Earth a Dwarf Planet? ;-) (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't mind the "promotion" of Ceres to the status of a planet. I think that is a long time coming.
Of course, I personally think that physical characteristics such as having hydrostatic equilibrium and perhaps a measurable atmosphere ought to be criteria for a planet instead of solar centric definitions.
If this means Mercury is "demoted" to dwarf planet status and Titan is "promoted" to the status of a full-fledged planet (thus having the Earth's Moon as a dwarf planet too) is also fine with me. These ar
Okay, maybe I'm missing something here... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to me Earth and the asteroid could be in nearly identical orbits and pass each other, or in the same orbit and never collide so long as they're travelling the same speed (or is it velocity?) but two objects traveling the s
Re:Okay, maybe I'm missing something here... (Score:5, Insightful)
To invoke the inevitable car analogy, that's like saying two cars driving in the same lane on the highway can pass each other. I think, more likely, the would collide.
Space is a big place. Think of it more as if I-80, that great American cross-country interstate, wrapped around the world instead of just our little country. Even with one lane, you might never see another car. To add to that, think of I-80 as being a mile wide. The chances of hitting another car go down by a bit then, even if you happen to overtake the other car.
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This is just sloppy terminology.
They are in close, but not identical, orbits around the Sun.
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Think of the Earth/Moon as a car and the asteroid as a moped lane-splitting.
summary misses the interesting point of coorbital (Score:5, Informative)
since the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
according to this java simulation of the object's orbit [nasa.gov], it won't be this close again until about 2100.
Re:summary misses the interesting point of coorbit (Score:2)
the asteroid is coorbital, it's a little misleading to say that it's "passing" within 400,000 miles. what's really interesting is that it will be at more or less that same distance for many months, suggesting that it and earth share a common history.
So earth and this asteroid have a "history" that results in them still orbiting in the same social circles, but generally trying to stay as far apart from one another as they can, though it's always possible that gravity may draw them together in a catastrophic
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Seriously, though, it intuitively seems like the danger from rogue asteroids comes from an intersecting orbit, with a high closure velocity prior to impact. This one may cause problems if it enters our atmosphere, but if it's already in a similar orbit, the energy dissipated would be mainly that associated with falling into our gravity well. Ho
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true, it could be coincidental - earth may have captured it or it could be a total fluke, but looking at the simulation of the orbits, it sure *looks* like they were once one body.
probably it's a lost mesozoic space capsule.
A lost Lunar Probe ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever I hear of something like this, I have to wonder if it is a "lost" interplanetary probe (or the upper stage of one, or some other related debris). With this orbit, 2009 BD could be an old lunar flyby, maybe from the 1960's.
Remember, the size estimate requires an albedo estimate, and rocket pieces tend to be very reflective, and thus will appear to be larger if the albedo is set too low, so if it was a spacecraft it would not be 10 meters, but maybe 4 or 5 at most. The Apollo 8, 10 and 11 third stages would be a possible candidate. (After Apollo 11, the third stages were impacted on the Moon to serve as sources for the seismometers.)
Such lost probes will return to near the Earth, but perturbations will tend to move them slowly further away with time.
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Yeah, I replied there.
How many "second moons" do we have ? (Score:4, Informative)
3753 Cruithne is in a Earth resonance orbit and is the first asteroid called "Earth's second moon". I don't know how many we are supposed to have now, but with this one, it is at least 3.
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Well, Moons can be defined a lot of ways. If you look at an orbital plot in a reference frame that rotates with the Earth's orbit (so that the Earth and the Sun appear to be fixed, or nearly so), then these "co-orbitals" may appear to orbit the Earth. So from that standpoint, they appear to be satellites.
I might also point out that from the Sun's point of view the orbit of the Moon (the big one) never appears to actually cross itself as it orbits around the Earth (i.e., as plotted from a Sun fixed frame the
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Co-orbital? (Score:2)
If it shares the Earth's orbit, shouldn't its speed, relative to the Earth, be zero? Objects in the same orbit travel at the same speed, don't they? Am I just being pedantic?
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Re:Co-orbital? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it shares the Earth's orbit, shouldn't its speed, relative to the Earth, be zero?
On average, but not necessarily at any given time.
Various astronomers have pointed out that the Earth and Luna are effectively two small planets sharing an orbit. On average, they have the same orbital speed, but because of their masses, they can't maintain a constant distance apart. For a while, they are accelerating toward each other, slowing down the one that's leading and speeding up the one that's trailing. This makes the leading one drop toward the sun slightly, while the trailing one moves out slightly, and they pass. Then they've changed roles, and the process repeats. From either one of them, it looks like the other is a satellite. And while they both have the same average orbital speed around the sun, at any given time both have an instantaneous speed that's slightly different from that average.
There's a similar pair of moons in the Saturn system, that share an orbit and are repeatedly swapping the leading/trailing positions. Actually, this effectively happens with any planet-moon pair, but in cases like Mars or Jupiter, where the satellites are many orders of magnitude smaller than the planet, the effect on the planet can't be detected because the planet's changes of orbital speed are too small to be measured by our instruments.
This new object could be compared to the Earth's moon, but it's a lot smaller and is in a much wider orbit. Or all three could be considered objects with nearly-identical orbits around the sun, constantly swapping leading/trailing roles.
Similarly, I once read a description of the solar system as the sun and Jupiter plus a few billion insignificant pieces of smaller junk sharing a common orbit around the galactic center. What made them a "solar system" was that they were close enough together to be gravitationally bound, so they appeared to local observers to be orbiting each other.
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Well, firstly if it's going to pass "within X miles" of the Earth, then it's not in the same orbit, it's in one that's X miles different from the Earth. Secondly, the Earth has gravity (as do Mars and Venus) and will perturb the orbits enough to give them relative motion.
But yeah, if it's in an orbit around the sun that's almost the same as the Earth, the delta-V is going to be very low.
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Different masses require different speeds to keep the same orbit.
Uh, no they don't - that would be a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principal (SEP), which holds exactly in General Relativity, and has been tested via the Nordtvedt effect in Lunar Laser Ranging to better than a part per thousand.
These co-orbitals do indeed have very low speeds relative to Earth. They are not in the same orbit, just very close ones.
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Actually, various physicists and mathematicians have point out that there's a far simpler way to debunk that idea, related to the old idea that heavy objects should fall faster than lighter objects (when air resi
Damit (Score:2)
Cumulative Impact Risk? (Score:2)
The object in TFA poses no significant danger. More accurately, "posed". It's closest approach (691,200 km) was the day before the article.
No presently tracked NEO poses more than about a 0.13% cumulative impact probability for all its projected passes over the next century (2000 SG344).
But as more objects are located, and their individual cumulative impact probabilities are calculated, they're compiled into pages such as at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ [nasa.gov] . These objects don't care about each other and thei
not sure about this one but... (Score:2)
10m across, 400,000 miles away (Score:2)
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> Astronomically, it's kind of close.
That's correct, but for trivial semantic reaons: 'astronomically' means 'using a scale where we talk about really distant things as if they're a lot closer'. You know, like the way 'geologically' means 'using a scale where really long times are considered short'. So saying 'geologically speaking, a million years ago is just a blink of an eye' is tautological. :-)
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Are you saying that you are the size of a medium sized suburb?
*phew* (Score:2)
Bruce Willis can stay home.
KANM theory & a third body of mass zero (Score:2)
yikes... a three body problem... not predictable...
Actually, if the asteroid is only 10m in diameter, then, relative to the earth & the moon, it has darned near zero mass, at which point KANM theory [Kolmogorov Arnold Nash Moser] would apply.
*
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Someone had made this same point at Universe Today. I think it would be extremely fascinating to study a returning deep space probe that's in heliocentric orbit, such as