Small Asteroid To Buzz Earth 171
ddelmonte writes in to tell us about a small near-earth object, discovered just 2 days ago, that is expected to pass within 64,000 km of our planet on March 2, 13:44 UT. NEO 2009 DD45 will be well inside the Moon's orbit and just under twice the altitude of geosynchronous satellites. According to Sky and Telescope, 2009 DD45's closest approach will be over the Pacific west of Tahiti, so observers in Australia, Japan, and perhaps Hawaii will have the best chance of spotting it with, say, an 8-in. telescope. Here's where you can generate an ephemeris of the object for your location. At closest approach NEO 2009 DD45 will be moving half a degree per minute and peaking around magnitude 10.5. It will be brighter than 13th magnitude for only a few hours.
Piggy ride! (Score:5, Interesting)
Impossible in this timespan (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Impossible in this timespan (Score:5, Funny)
(IANARS) There's simply no way that any space agency could prepare and launch a probe with less than three days notice, and likely no good way to pre-build one without knowing what size/speed asteroid we might be lucky enough to launch at.
I dunno . . . The Thunderbirds seem to be able to get anywhere they want to go, real fast. And Doctor Who just seems to be able to go where ever he damn well pleases, as well.
Re:Impossible in this timespan (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately though, they also have the disadvantage of not being real.
Which is quite unfortunate, in reality.
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But Dr. Who only gets exactly where he pleases when it satisfies the writers. Most of the time it seems that some sort of space-time vortex sucks him off-course, or the Tardis misbehaves, or other such circumstance landing him in the wrong space/time.
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But Dr. Who only gets exactly where he pleases when it satisfies the writers. Most of the time it seems that some sort of space-time vortex sucks him off-course, or the Tardis misbehaves, or other such circumstance landing him in the wrong space/time.
Just once they should go somewhere and nothing happens - maybe only a 5min episode to keep us hooked.
Speaking of near misses.
Don't forget that many many years ago the Doctor (and Adric) accidently set off life on this planet. Though only one of them lived to tell about it I guess.
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And Doctor Who just seems to be able to go where ever he damn well pleases, as well.
Well sure, once you can go anywhen, it makes it a lot easier to go anywhere. Anyplace was everyplace (and very small to boot) at some point in time, so you go backwards in time until it's all close together, relocate, and then go forward in time staying with your new location...
Re:Impossible in this timespan (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, if you can make a functional space craft that looks like an English Police box, I'll support your candidacy for head of Nasa.
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Without the time machine? Meh. Besides, why do you want to copy the only non-functional technology on the TARDIS? Chameleon circuit, now we're talking...
Re:Impossible in this timespan (Score:5, Interesting)
While you're absolutely correct, there is a program known as Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) thats being headed up by DoD rather than NASA that is headed in that direction. I think the time-frame they're considering is closer to 2 weeks, but the general idea is to be able to recognize a need, and design, construct and launch a mission in that period of time. That includes getting adjustable plug-and-play parts (GNC, Power, structures, propulsion) that you can tune and modify quickly to fit the mission profile.
Presumably, a lot of the work to streamline the process of designing the bus and plugging in instruments could be easily translated to space science missions, and if a future opportunity like this were available we could do exactly that. Of course, you'd have to have a pretty interesting guidance system and a very robust structure, since you'd only get an advantage if you stuck the probe in the asteroids path and let it slam into it to get the momentum.
What if it waits in orbit? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you had several such pre-built probes waiting in orbit, you would have a much better chance, no? The probes would have the advantage that they're already out of the deepest part of Earth's gravity well, and that you could choose the one whose orbit is best. I would think that with only two or three you would be able to do what he wanted.
OTOH, I'm not convinced it would be cost-effective. Depends on how often do asteroids pass by close enough to make it worth our while (and how often they're worth piggy-b
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Re:Impossible in this timespan (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
"This little cosmic surprise, designated 2009 DD45, turned up two days ago as a 19th-magnitude blip in images taken by Rob McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. It was already within 1.5 million miles of Earth and closing fast."
So no, they had no prior info about this asteroid. And yes, this fact concerns me as well, but this is the problem with asteroids / comets having a low albedo - they're difficult to observe with the usual instruments.
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:5, Informative)
IF you land on it, it will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion for a VERY long time... that could be rather useful
It you match speeds with it you will continue to travel without fuel for propulsion indefinitely. Being docked to a rock will make no difference. The advantage of having the rock there is that you can mine it for resources and use it as a radiation shield. You could also push transfer momentum to it if you want to change your velocity.
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:5, Informative)
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The benefit only comes in matching position and letting the asteroid change the velocity of the spacecraft to match. As long as the spacecraft survives that impact, then it can be used to provide a great momentum transfer.
Gigantic. Bungee.
Brilliant, huh?
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Gigantic. Bungee.
This is actually not completely insane. Just dumping some guesses at "reasonable" parameters into a dumb-as-rocks bit of Python to simulate the encounter, a bungee with a relaxed length of 1000 km and a spring constant of 10^-3 N/m would do the job with a peak acceleration of about 160 g assuming 50 km/s delta-v. Total acceleration time is about 100 seconds, and the bungee stretches out to about two and a half times its relaxed length.
If you had a material that would stretch up to 10 tim
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a bungee with a relaxed length of 1000 km and a spring constant of 10^-3 N/m would do the job with a peak acceleration of about 160 g assuming 50 km/s delta-v. Total acceleration time is about 100 seconds, and the bungee stretches out to about two and a half times its relaxed length.
:-)
Of course, then there are the issues of getting a 1000 km bungee up there, and figuring out how to lasso the asteroid.
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It's not crazy at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) [wikipedia.org]
Compared to using pneumatic springs to harness and dampen the force of exploding atomic bombs in order to propel a manned craft, coupling to an asteroid is downright quaint.
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Gigantic. Bungee.
This is actually not completely insane.
It is an insanely exciting idea. Imagine hooking on to an object like that in a small spacecraft. A few thoughts on the subject:
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Could be useful for mining out, then you have a massive deathstar spaceship made out of rock.
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Surely the asteroid has considerable inertia due to its mass? A probe would have to apply thrust to overcome gravity wells that it encounters. The asteroid will be affected by the "drag" of passing close to large bodies but already has considerable ineria.
Let's say that I sent a ping pong ball, a house brick, and a 20t lump of iron heading away from earth at 5 m/s. I would expect the ping pong ball to slow most quickly, followed by the house brick. In some situations, the lump of iron might be able to escape where the others would not. You'd experience the same effect if you tried to stop a car rolling down hill a ten miles per hour and then compared it to stopping a skate board moving at the same speed. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Yes, you're missing the basics of physics... This whole post is pretty much bullshit.
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah. No friction or air resistance in space, that's what you're missing. Oh, and all of physics since Galileo, you're missing that too.
The brick has less mass than the iron lump, true - and so it has proportionately less inertia. But the gravitational force on the brick is also less than that of the iron lump, by the same proportion. The two cancel out. If they have the same velocity, then if one escapes, so does the other. It's the same principle as how a brick will fall at the same speed as a feather, if dropped in a vacuum.
Similarly, if a spaceprobe and an asteroid fly away from the Earth at the same velocity, it doesn't matter whether they're attached or separate: both will follow the same path.
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Solar wind?
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Yeah. No friction or air resistance in space, that's what you're missing. Oh, and all of physics since Galileo, you're missing that too.
That's not true. There is a very small amount of air resistance in space (interstellar hydrogen.) In theory, stuff released out into space won't coast forever relative to the origin - just damned near it. Also, two items released into "empty" space on a parallel course will NOT continue on a parallel course. They will gravitationally attract one another. Who's missing what, now? :)
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:4, Informative)
Have you read anything by this guy Newton? Fig, or Isaac, one of the two. He pretty much explained (about 300 years ago) how this whole "gravity" thing works.
And, for what's it's worth, 5 miles/second (I shudder to think you might have meant metres/second) is below escape velocity. It's barely above orbital velocity. So not even your lump of iron would escape. Even if gravity worked they way you think it does, as opposed to the way it really does.
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Well, if you go by his sig, he'll still defend you to death...right? Right? Hello? hmmm, seems like he left...
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OK, OK. Looks like a made mistake on that one. Although, I did phrase my point as a question, as I'm no expert on space science. My mistake.
I understood where you were coming from. These are common beginners' misconceptions.
Here's how it works (you confused a few things). We have things like mass, cross-sectional area (important in slowing things down), density, etc.
For starters, let's use your ping pong ball, brick, and iron. Furthermore, let's assume a perfect vacuum. If I fire them all at velocity v, they'll continue forever at velocity v. Mass doesn't make them slow down (but it does affect how much energy I have to expend to make them g
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a 30 metre object moving well over escape velocity. You snag it with the net, and then endure 9000 gravities acceleration, and in only a tenth of a second, you've matched orbits.
If your tether will stretch to a length of 450 metres while holding a weight (you, or a satellite your size) of about 2000 tons.
Good luck with that.
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It's a 30 metre object moving well over escape velocity. You snag it with the net, and then endure 9000 gravities acceleration, and in only a tenth of a second, you've matched orbits.
So use a long tether.
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If your tether will stretch to a length of 450 metres while holding a weight (you, or a satellite your size) of about 2000 tons.
Some spiders catch prey many times their size by creating webs which include stress-release points which consist of a glob of sticky material filled with some gathered web. When a heavy impact hits the web, the gathered material pays out and distributes an immense amount of force.
By making the tether stretch to 100x its length you could reduce the shock to 90 Gs nominal, which is theoretically doable. heh heh.
I don't think we'll do it today or tomorrow, but maybe next week, eh?
What if (Score:2)
Suppose the main (heavy) probe was sitting in GEO or something, but shot a lightweight harpoon into the meteor's orbit. Then the trick would be to get the tether to pay out quickly, and the main probe to slowly increase tension so it can accelerate into the meteor's orbit.
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If you can only manage a few hundred m/s speed difference between the two, it's probably not worth doing -- rockets to provide that much delta-v just aren't that large or heavy, and this would be complicated, heavy, and new. If you want to do more than that, then you have a whole different problem -- making a harpoon work at several km/s sounds nontrivial, never mind the cable payout system or the mass of a cable that long (unless your probe can handle ridiculous accelerations, 1/2*a*t^2 means you have a v
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Re:Piggy ride! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't we send a probe that will land on this asteroid and then piggy ride on it.
"Landing" would either actually be "crashing at a speed measured in km/s" or would require just as much fuel as going in the same orbit without the asteroid, and then what's the point...
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:5, Informative)
If we have the deltaV to land on the rock, then we have the deltaV to match its orbit without bothering to land on it. So why waste time with the landing?
Or were you thinking that little or no deltaV would be required because the rock was passing close by?
Well, no, a quick guesstimate based on the limited information in the article has it passing at about 9km/s relative to Earth, at 64000km altitude. Which is rather more than escape speed. About 8500 m/s over Earth escape speed, in fact. We've sent probes out faster than that a few times. The stuff that goes out past Jupiter, for instance. But it's a non-trivial exercise.
Not necessarily. (Score:2)
If we have the deltaV to land on the rock, then we have the deltaV to match its orbit without bothering to land on it. So why waste time with the landing?
Well, you could fire a bullet straight up. If it peaked at say a mile up, its velocity would be zero, but, it could still hit a plane regardless of its velocity if you timed it right.
In the case of the asteroid, we could theoretically, anyway, shoot up something to an altitude of 64k km, have it "hit" the asteroid, and then continue on its merry way. Tha
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:5, Informative)
Physics doesn't work that way.
You seem to think it's like hopping on the back of an old London bus: grab it as it passes and jump up onto the step. But speeds in space are far greater than that. If you try to catch an asteroid as it passes, words like 'splat' or 'crunch' are appropriate. You need to match the asteroid's velocity very closely in order to land on it without being destroyed - and if you can do that, then you're on the same orbit as the asteroid anyway, and you'll go where it goes whether you land or not. So you don't actually need the asteroid to be there.
I suppose you might arrange something cunning with a big net and a lot of bungee rope, if you can pull off an incredibly accurate flight plan, but even so it's unlikely that the asteroid is going to be near any other targets of interest in the near future; it's more worth your while to load up the extra fuel needed to fly direct to the planet or moon you want to study.
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Has nobody on Slashdot ever heard of harpoons or grappling hooks?
IANAA (I Am Not An Astrophysicist), but let's say hypothetically that this asteroid is 1 km in diameter. We send up a probe with a 1.1km tether. The probe releases the tether into the path of the asteroid, and the end of the tether has hooks. When the asteroid smacks into the tether, the probe hooks into it.
At this crucial moment, the probe must begin accelerating to match as much of the speed of the asteroid as possible without overtaking it.
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IAAA, granted not one who studies near-Earth objects or asteroids...
But, beyond direct exploration of the asteroid itself (and, ok, the kickass-cool factor of riding an asteroid), there really is little purpose to tagging along. Furthermore, it's serious sci-fi to even contemplate doing so. Your tether idea is interesting, but remember the speed difference between the asteroid and your probe is gonna be thousands of MPH so we're not just talking about a climbing rope here... so the path from "interesting"
Purposes (Score:2)
I can think of a few purposes.
(1) Set automated computer/video aboard the asteroid, and search out other asteroids. Plot trajectories, and relay info back to earth.
(2) Use asteroid mounted telescopes to take photos of (and out of) the solar system at different times and angles. These are occasional, but are all preset according to time, date, and direction, and match from one asteroid to another. Transmit data to other asteroid riding probes, and any time a probe comes close to earth, tra
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I've never heard of a harpoon or grappling hook that could survive the use you want to put it to. The hook, and/or the tether, and/or the probe, and/or the asteroid itself would be destroyed during the tug-of-war between the asteroid and the probe.
There's also a very real concern that the attempt to accelerate the probe would drag the asteroid into a much less interesting orbit. Equal and opposite reactions, conservation of momentum, etc. My guess is, if you could make the probe survive the attempt to te
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The asteroid wouldn't change direction under its own power. Such an assumption would be absolutely ludicrous on my part. I was talking more about gravitational forces of things bigger than the asteroid affecting its trajectory.
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The point is, any external influence on the asteroid's path (such as a large gravitational pull) would have exactly the same impact on the probe's path, whether the asteroid is present or not. Gravity affects all matter equally.
Re:Piggy ride! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well...
Landing a probe on an asteroid passing by at this speed, would be like trying to catch a bullet with your bare hands.
I'd say the mental imagery is pretty close to accurate, in both cases.
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Good imagery. Note that the the rock is moving about five times as fast (relative to Earth) as the fastest bullet.
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I think the notion of relative velocities is enough to eliminate that prospect entirely. If you don't match velocities with the object your piggybacking onto, you're crashing into it. If you do match speeds, then what was the point of the piggybacking in the first place?
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What if you placed a probe directly in the path of the asteroid, then unfurled a few hundred km long spring. Then the asteroid would compress the spring as it began to impact the probe. One the spring was fully compacted it would redirect the energy into the probe providing a free speed boost.
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With any luck the probe would modify the asteroid's orbit just enough so that the next time round it slammed into earth.
A potential 3rd moon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming of course you count Cruithne [wikipedia.org] as a moon. What happens once it passes our gravity?
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5th, actually [wikipedia.org]
Known satelittes and quasi-satellites wrt Earth
Moon
Cruithne (Earth's first known quasi-satellites)
2003 YN107
(164207) 2004 GU9
Parent links to malicious site (Score:3, Informative)
Looking at the source of the page, it attempts to download a movie on eDonkey, change your AIM name, send off spam emails, open up lots more windows, and probably much more. It also moves the window around so you can't close it, and pops up messages when you try to alt+f4.
In short; DO NOT CLICK
obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
/ducks
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/donald and /daffy?
Buzz vs. Non-buzz (Score:5, Informative)
Three days notice. 20 to 50 meter diameter. Assume it's dense rock and a vertical impact trajectory into the ocean (avg. 1000 m depth).
Impact energy 116 kT to 1.8 MT. Very near the lowest energy potential impact of the known NEOs, actually. Not relevant here since the object quite clearly misses. But if and when one doesn't miss, someplace is going to catch a small to medium nuke sized blast, and there won't be time to do squat about it.
My money says we'll have the capability to defend ourselves against such an impact. The second time.
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It could be a very hairy but profitable way to travel.
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We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
I'd guess we'll get near miss after near miss, we'll ignore Tunguska-scale impacts at sea and in the tundra and in the desert just like we ignored Shoemaker-Levy 9... Nobody will fund a serious def
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just like we ignored Shoemaker-Levy 9...
In what way did we ignore Shoemaker-Levy 9? That wasn't our planet after all.
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We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
You think sea strikes are harmless? The odds of actually hitting a city are pretty small, but the odds of hitting a chunk of water near enough to populated areas to cause tsunami damage are much larger since, according to NOAA [noaa.gov], coastal counties in the continental US account for only 17% of land area but have 53% of the population. Imagine what a 10m or more surge from a tsunami could do to the Netherlands, or Miami, or New York. For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to relea
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For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to release around 20MT of energy at the surface, and produced as much as 30m surges hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.
Okay. So that's 20 times the 1MT we're talking about. So that would be 1.5m surge.
I think New York is safe.
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Somebody below gave a link to a site which calculates that the crater opened in the water could have a diameter of 1.4km. I'm inclined to believe you'd see more than a 1.5m surge if something punched a 1.4km hole in the ocean along the continental shelf.
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Imagine what a 10m or more surge from a tsunami could do to the Netherlands, or Miami, or New York.
I do every day, but it still never happens. :(
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Re:Buzz vs. Non-buzz (Score:4, Funny)
There's only so much matter, after enough time, we don't have to worry about anymore collisions.
I vote we wait it out.
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If what I've read about large meteor impacts is correct, a 30 meter sized meteor impacting the ground not only will have an explosive yield around that of the W88 warhead used on the Trident II missile (circa 475 kT), but also you have the highly dangerous issue of local fallout where the fallout is burning ash around 1,200 degrees F.! That right there will start massive firestorms many miles away from the point of impact.
This is ghostwriter asking for Permission to Buzz (Score:2)
This is ghostwriter asking for Permission to Buzz the Earth.
Armageddon (Score:4, Funny)
Close call (Score:5, Interesting)
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Without any actual analysis, I'll go out on a limb and estimate it would cause as much havoc as any large man-made piece of junk out there, like say a dead Soviet satellite. A much larger asteroid would be a different story, since not only would it have a larger footprint, but would also have hard-to-predict gravitational effects on all the satellites that got too near it. Of course, we're doing a pretty good job of detecting larger NEOs now... Apophis is the most problematic, mostly because we simply don
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Apophis is the most problematic, mostly because we simply don't have high enough precision knowledge of its position to know where it will be in 2029 and 2036.
Well, that and its habit of enslaving humans to feed its goa'uld power trip fantasies.
Re:A good use of the Gov't Money (Score:2)
Let me ask the resident experts: With all the different telescopes that litter the earth, how is it that we miss these types of objects coming so close to our planet? I know that space is vast (practically beyond rational imagination), but is there a way to observe a region of space encompassing several days/weeks/months with objects traveling at a certain speed? What would those costs be? (I bet it would be under 700 Billion USD)
I found this article pretty interesting about a space based constellaton of sa
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It is going to require an 8" telescope to see it at 64,000 km. Brightness is inversely proportional to the square of distance. Extrapolate.
Another one from Klendathu... (Score:3, Funny)
So, I used a calc on the impact (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ [arizona.edu]
And the results are (assumed that you are 2000km from impact - if it hit it would be in the ocean...)
Your Inputs: Distance from Impact: 2000.00 km = 1242.00 miles
Projectile Diameter: 30.00 m = 98.40 ft = 0.02 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 1000 kg/m3
Target Type: Liquid Water of depth 100.00
meters, over typical rock.
Energy: Energy before atmospheric entry: 1.63 x 1016 Joules = 3.90 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 314.0 years
Atmospheric Entry: The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 14100 meters = 46100 ft
The projectile reaches the ground in a broken condition. The mass of projectile strikes the surface at velocity 10.8 km/s = 6.7 miles/s The impact energy is 6.58 x 1015 Joules = 1.57 MegaTons.
The broken projectile fragments strike the ground in an ellipse of dimension 0.151 km by 0.151 km
Major Global Changes: The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
Crater Dimensions:
What does this mean?
The crater opened in the water has a diameter of 1.4 km = 0.866 miles
For the crater formed in the seafloor: Crater shape is normal in spite of atmospheric crushing; fragments are not significantly dispersed.
Transient Crater Diameter: 670 m = 2200 ft
Transient Crater Depth: 237 m = 777 ft
Final Crater Diameter: 837 m = 2750 ft
Final Crater Depth: 179 m = 586 ft
The crater formed is a simple crater
The floor of the crater is underlain by a lens of broken rock debris (breccia) with a maximum thickness of 82.8 m = 272 ft.
At this impact velocity ( Thermal Radiation: What does this mean?
At this impact velocity ( Seismic Effects: What does this mean?
The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 400 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 4.4
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 2000 km:
Nothing would be felt. However, seismic equipment may still detect the shaking.
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Transient Crater Depth: 237 m [...] Richter Scale Magnitude: 4.4
Huh ? You make a 200m deep hole in the ground in one second and it doesn't even register as a worthwhile earthquake ?!? There must be something wrong here.
Why Not Tahiti? (Score:2)
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In those few hours it will be greater than 13th magnitude it's velocity will change by about 1km/s or ~30000km/h from the force of the earth alone.
Most of which it will give back on the way out. So what is the net velocity change for the earth encounter?
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There will be a significant change in direction. How much kinetic energy it gains or loses depends on the details.
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m2/m1xdelta-v, or diminishingly small; that's the useful part about using planetary passes to change velocity - they affect the planet in a negligible way. Kind of like driving to the store makes a negligible change in the CO2 in the atmosphere vs. walking. If all the asteroids started going for a joy ride, or taking vacation past earth every summer just for the fun of it, we'd start to notice. ;-)
Re:Another perspective (Score:5, Informative)
1 km/s is EXACTLY 3,600 km/h. Not roughly 30,000 km/h as you suggest.
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> That was me. Must have hit AC by mistake
No, no.. the meteor didn't hit anything.. but thanks for flying by if it indeed was you.
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> Geosynchronous orbit is 32,000 miles...
Geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles.
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Surely the refutation is no more helpful to the reader if it's just your word against GP's...
Quite many will throw out a wrong fact. Quite few will correct a right answer with a wrong answer. That's 90% proof to me. If I've consulted google and wikipedia it's 99% proof. If I needed 99.99% proof I'd check up an alledgely authoritative source. Then you have all the paranoid options.
Slashdot is a discussion forum, not a source-citing masturbatory like wikipedia. Sources are great for hitting people with a clue-by-four if they keep insisting on something wrong but otherwise it's completely superflous.
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[citation needed]
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^That this was modded interesting made me lose faith in humanity.
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the U.S. has no such thing, the biggest bomb ever was soviet made
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The biggest ever detonated was Soviet made. I'm not sure who would know what the biggest ever built was, but I doubt seriously it's any of us.
And besides, a 15 MT bomb would do nicely here. And we have those.
Unless we decommissioned them as part of one of the SALTs. Anyone know?
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Vietnam - ten years, 50,000 dead.
Iraq - six years, less than 5000 dead.
Looks like he was right.
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The iraq death toll is nearing 100,000.
Of course the official figures don't count 'uninteresting' people like anyone without an american accent.
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hide mostly meant "keep officially declared", plenty of early sightings of that bird.
But very large nukes such as that Tsar bomb can't be put on even the largest of our rockets, just too damn heavy.