Asteroid Apophis Just Got Bigger 182
astroengine writes "As the potentially hazardous asteroid makes closest approach to Earth today, astronomers using the European Herschel Space Observatory have announced something a little unsettling: asteroid 99942 Apophis is actually bigger than we thought. Herschel astronomers have deduced that Apophis is 1,066 feet (325 meters) wide. That's 20 percent larger than the previous estimate of 885 feet (270 meters). 'The 20 percent increase in diameter, from 270 to 325 m, translates into a 75 percent increase in our estimates of the asteroid's volume or mass,' said Thomas Müller of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and lead scientist of the study. In addition, the space telescope has re-analyzed the albedo of the space rock, providing a valuable heat map of the object's surface — data that will improve orbital trajectory models."
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
...does this mean we're more likely to die or less likely to die?
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the chances we are all going to die are still 100%. The only question is when.
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Only about 95% of all humans who have ever existed have died. There's still a 5% fighting chance immortality exists. Not only that, but my odds are better than most humans, past and present.
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Yeah, but the exponential growth curve really only started quite recently, they only manifest during the brief window between when you remove/restrict one limiting factor, and when another limiting factor comes into play. And there's *always* another limiting factor, it's just that humans recently managed to overcome a couple of them in a row.
Meanwhile we have a *lot* of ancestors, a few hundred thousand years of human prehistory where the population was fairly stable - call it 10,000 generations * 1 milli
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But I was having so much fun! [youtube.com]
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Well, we warned you, but NOoooo, you just HAD to do that! Those of us who were good are now all rich, have no DRM, patents, copyrights, lawyers, and trolls don't exist, porn is pointless because all the supermodels want to fuck nerds... Man, I'm glad I didn't follow you!
Gotta love thos Mayans... or in your case, hate 'em.
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Well, if you were leading a government, and you know that an asteroid is going to hit the earth, are you going tell everyone that, knowing that it would cause mass hysteria, riots,etc..., long before the asteroid would hit.
Probably not.
And Leon's getting LARGERRRR! (Score:5, Funny)
Someone had to say it.
Size Queen Weekly claims Aphophis 20% bigger (Score:5, Funny)
different mirror (Score:5, Funny)
No, it just means that the astronomers are using the telescope that doesn't have the mirror with the words "objects are closer than they appear" on it.
Re:different mirror (Score:4, Funny)
No, it just means that the astronomers are using the telescope that doesn't have the mirror with the words "objects are closer than they appear" on it.
Isn't the whole point of a telescope to make exactly that happen? Maybe they're just holding it backwards.
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Cut her some slack, she's still in training.
Apophis larger than we thought (Score:5, Funny)
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There it is... the SG1 reference :)
Lovin' it. As loved as that series was, it really played itself out as completely as possible didn't it? Kinda went way beyond that. Still, I wish they kept Stargate Universe going. That was a series that had my interest.
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Same universe, different galaxy
IT's all NBC's fault and now comcast that messed u (Score:2)
IT's all NBC's fault and now comcast that messed up G4 owns them.
They got rid of there good thing they had on fridays and moved the show to mon going head to head with MNF and other big shows.
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The second season of SG:U got much better, and one of the best episodes was unfortunately the last episode of season two. Still, I can understand why you thought the series sucked as there were some episodes in that first season that caused some serious brain loss.
At least one of the actors found a good gig by playing Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon A Time. Mr. Gold still seems a bit like Dr. Rush though, and Robert Carlyle is able to portray somebody who makes your skin crawl and want to go out and kill the
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especially in the beginning.
1st season sucked until it became OK by the end
then by the middle of the 2nd season it got really good.
Then the ghost/wrestling channel didn't renew it.
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you know the amateur astronomers that discovered 'Aphophis' were big stargate fans, hence the name. SG1 reference built-in from the start.
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Stargate fans who knew nothing about nominative determinism [wikipedia.org]. Just sayin'.
Re:Apophis larger than we thought (Score:4, Insightful)
The big problem with Stargate: Universe was the plot induced stupidity in the characters. They were clearly trying to emulate the grim, gritty BSG which had plenty of its own plot-induced stupidity. Trouble is, it gets hard to ignore it when the plot-induced stupidity railroads the characters to irredeemable actions. There were plenty of these. Certainly enough that several main characters should have been relieved of all authority and locked up for the whole trip. The one that got to me the most was when there was a character trapped by the legs after a shuttle crash and, at his request, the commander suffocates him to death. I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off. When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia. When a patient is in transitory pain, no matter how extreme, but has excellent prospects for survival without pain, you simply shouldn't consider their requests since they're not in their right minds. That kind of nonsense, leaving you with no choice but to either pretend big chunks of the show didn't happen or hate some of the main characters, tends to wreck a show.
Sort of reminds of the first and only episode of Star Trek: Enterprise I watched. It was titled "Dear Doctor". In it, the captain and the ships doctor have a cure for an illness that's killing off the population of a planet who they've agreed to help. They decide, based on some crazy nazi-style eugenics destiny argument (with allusions to the not yet established Prime Directive), that the population is destined to die off in favor of another intelligent species that lives on the planet with them. So they withhold the cure as the "ethical" thing to do, but still present them with a partial treatment, then go on their merry way.
Generally speaking, I don't have a problem with fiction with characters that morally flawed. Humans are often morally flawed. The problem is when the fictional treatment also puts these criminally incompetent characters on a pedestal.
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...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
When a patient is in extreme chronic pain that can't be stopped and will last for the rest of their life and begs to die, it's time to consider euthensia.
That would be exactly the situation here. The only options were to either euthanize him, or leave him there in pain to die alone. He asked for the former, and got it.
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...I think euthanasia may be appropriate in certain situations, but not when you can put the minds of a couple of expert trauma surgeons into some of the crew and just cut the patients legs off, or waste some explosives to try and remove the debris, or send the ships robot down to the surface to move the debris, or any of a dozen ideas better than just having a few soldiers try to muscle the debris off.
None of these options were possible at the time.
All of those options were available at the time. He was killed by Young after they had established a gate connection to the planet, so all the resources of the ship were available including the minds of trauma surgeons on Earth dropped into any body they chose (the stones were fully operational in that episode as one of the characters mentions that she's just made a report to the IOA during these events). Turns out I did forget that they were able to lift the debris, they just stopped because the pressure
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Nope. The ship had already jumped once, but they'd ended up back in range (and at that point, Rush could control the jumping of the ship) and had plenty of time. Young hangs around the corpse he just created for a long time after killing him. They never even bring in a surgeon from Earth, even though they have plenty of time to do so and their one medic is apparently completely incompetent even though, with the available technology they could have been sending her to med school on Earth every day for most o
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Of course the asteroid was named by a bunch of SG1 fans, so the reference is quite fitting. That he was the Egyptian death god didn't hurt when it came time to convince the IAU that the name was appropriate. What surprises me is that this name wasn't previously taken by a Kuiper Belt object.
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Its a ball of replicators that resemble a rock. Call your congressional representitives tell them we're going to need more guns.
Re:Apophis larger than we thought (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean we need to prepare for a Goa'uld invasion?
No. Antarctica is melting at an unprecidented rate. It's only a matter of time before they discover the research station the Ancients left behind.
Re:Apophis larger than we thought (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Apophis larger than we thought (Score:5, Funny)
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Aww crap. I don't suppose anyone has a Tel'tak lying around?
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it's at area 51-A
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Wormhole Extreme!!!!!!
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Peter Williams just gained weight.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Indeed.
Thanks, Teal'c.
SG-1 (Score:4, Insightful)
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The guys who named it were big fans (true story).
2029 approach (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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It seems to keep getting a little closer with each return orbit.
That is not how orbital mechanics works. In fact close approaches change the orbit rather drastically.
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Oh, please; by that time Congress will still be debating about raising the debt ceiling. Maybe the Chinese, but only if they're paid for their effort (read: Taiwan).
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We don't have a moon colony because we lack the capability, but because we lack the will. The space program pretty much dried up after the collapse of the USSR put an end to the international pissing contest that was driving it. After that it was restricted to missions with either an economic payoff or considerable scientific value, a moon colony promises neither (at least in the short term).
Now capturing apophis would be a major challenge due to it's large relative velocity, but "lassoing" it to an ion d
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It's okay. We'll totally have flying cars by then.
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Re:2029 approach (Score:5, Informative)
For those who are hoping to see it, that distance puts it at two arcseconds wide (if my calculations are decent). This is roughly the same width in the sky as Neptune, or 900 times smaller diameter than our moon on an average day.
Re:2029 approach (Score:4, Funny)
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How reassuring that they have such accurate estimates of things like orbit and mass.
Re:2029 approach (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a lot easier to calculate orbit than mass, and the latter is pretty much irrelevant to the former--Earth is so much more massive than Apophis can possibly be that the asteroid's mass can be ignored in any orbital calculation. So we'll know if it's going to hit us or not, even if we don't know how big a boom it will make if it does hit.
Or... (Score:2)
Little do you realize that Apophis actually has a neutronium core and a near miss would sling the Earth out of its orbit. Ironically we should be hoping for a direct hit which, while devastating, would likely punch right through the planet and disrupt the Earths orbit far less, allowing for at least the hope of long-term survival :-P
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That's not how probability works. The same could be said about *anything* in the future or is currently unknown. So it's basically meaningless.
Re:2029 approach (Score:4, Interesting)
"The real probability"? I suppose then the "real probability" of you buying a winning lottery ticket, or rolling 6 twenty consecutive times, etc, etc, are all 0 or 100% too.
Yes, actually. That's what probability really is.
It is not the event itself which is uncertain, but rather our knowledge of the event. In this type of situation, if we make a GUESS, the probability tells us how likely we are to have guessed correctly.
Think about it like this. Take out a deck of cards, shuffle it, and set it face down. There is a card on the top. If you say the name of a card out loud, you have a 1/52 chance of saying the card which is actually on top. We can consider the actual value of that card to be uncertain from a mathematical point of view, but in reality its value is already fixed- you just don't know the value.
In regards to the lottery ticket, we actually know a little bit more. If you do not purchase a ticket at all, we CAN say with 100% certainty that you do not hold the winning ticket. If you DO purchase a ticket, we cannot say for certain if you have the winning ticket or not, but the reality is that either you have a winning ticket, or you do not.
The problem with your line of thinking is that you are confusing a prediction with an actuality. We use probability to determine future events when we have incomplete knowledge, once our knowledge of ALL factors which influence the event is complete, then it is no longer an unknown and we can say the event either will, or will not, occur. Or put another way, if you have access to all the data you're not predicting, you're simply calculating a result.
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Oh shit.
I'll tell Lorenz, you can call Feigenbaum.
So now it will be 35,999.945 km away? eeek! (Score:2)
So now the asteroid is estimated to be 325m not 270m across, it will be coming EVEN CLOSER at 35,999.945 km away? Eeek! run for the hills! we're dooomed Mr. Mainwaring!
Homeowners insurance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Homeowners insurance (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
asteroid 99942 Apophis is actually bigger than we thought
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzZ4i8aWs_s [youtube.com]
--
BMO
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Bruce Willis will succeed (Score:2)
Does that mean the hole has to be deeper than 800' for the nuclear weapon?
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The idea of drilling a tunnel is to focus the explosion so more energy goes upwards, similar to how guns use a barrel rather than just hitting a bullet at the explosive end pointed in the right direction. At a quick guess, a nuke in a moderately deep hole could have about twice the effect of a surface detonation, but that's assuming 100% of the charge gets directed upwards (some will go into the ground or be wasted by other things).
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The idea of drilling a tunnel is to focus the explosion so more energy goes upwards, similar to how guns use a barrel rather than just hitting a bullet at the explosive end pointed in the right direction. At a quick guess, a nuke in a moderately deep hole could have about twice the effect of a surface detonation, but that's assuming 100% of the charge gets directed upwards (some will go into the ground or be wasted by other things).
But here we're talking about drilling a hole that can be used as a nozzle (to direct the energy) or finding a natural formation that can be used to the same effect. Something like this would be relatively shallow on an object 350 meters wide. I mean compared to trying to use the nuke to break the asteroid into smaller pieces.
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The problem with drilling a "barrel hole" in an unstable object though it that there's a chance that the "wasted" energy will be enough to fragment the object into so many pieces we cant hope to stop them, basically converting a rifle slug into shotgun pellets. Now if the original object is small enough that's okay, any fragments that hit us will burn up on entry with minimal damage, for a larger object though we've quite possibly turned a probable near miss into an almost guaranteed hit, and getting hit b
1 Earth Diameter Close Pass (Score:5, Insightful)
"In April 2029 the space rock will still make a very close pass with our planet, coming within 22,364 miles"
Being the skeptical engineer, I would say there is also a chance that on its multihundred million mile trip over the next decade and a half all it would take to nudge the orbit a slight amount to make the close pass a hit would be an encounter with another large object that affected its orbit ever so slightly...the wrong way.
That orbital perturbation is random & would simply not be predictable.
Re:1 Earth Diameter Close Pass (Score:5, Insightful)
That orbital perturbation is random & would simply not be predictable.
Not exactly. It's passing by earth again in another 15 years or so -- and its orbit has to pass through a very small space in order for Earth's gravity to alter it just that tiny smidge so that over the following 15 years, that few thousands of a degree change due to gravitational pull will close that 22,364 mile gap. It has to be spot on -- if the vector is even slightly off, it'll either get slingshot out of the solar system (or into one of the outer planets), or into the Sun.
While you're right that the energy required to move the asteroid into a collision path is low, it has to be the precise amount, and at the precise vector. A random preturbation has a very low chance of being at both the correct energy level, and at the correct vector. And even many such random preturbations still wouldn't alter the orbit enough that if we looked for it on its next approach in a very narrow region of the sky, we couldn't find it. Which means we'll know its coming, and we'll have several years' warning to take action. I just hope they can clone Bruce Willis before then.
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I don't think the earth can give it enough energy to slingshot it out of the solar system. You would need Jupiter to do that.
And despite appearances it is hard for it to go into the Sun. It is in orbit around the Sun so would need to slow down a LOT to fall into the Sun. Look up how complicated it was for the messenger spacecraft to get into Mercury 's orbit. It takes a lot of energy to slow down. It is not simply a matter of pointing yourself at the Sun. There is no atmosphere to slow you down. Not like ob
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The orbit of Apophis ranges between 0.7 and 1.1 AU from the sun. In that range, there aren't any large objects it could encounter that we don't already know about. The major uncertainties in its projected orbit are from gravitational perturbations from the outer planets, sunlight pressure, etc., which are fairly well understood: it's quite certain that it won't hit the Earth in 2029.
However, the encounter with the Earth in 2029 will put Apophis in a new orbit, which depends quite sensitively on how closel
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But yes, gravitational systems can behave stochastically. However, there are no objects heavy enough to tug on Apophis enough to perterb its orbit enough before 2029. Our sl
Well, obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, obviously the asteroid had passed through the trans-fat and high-fructose corn syrup nebulae between photos.
So... (Score:2)
...those pills do work!
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Meanwhile... (Score:2)
Anybody noticing a trend here? (Score:2)
First people get fatter
Then the kilogram gains weight.
Now Apophis is bigger too.
Any speculations on what's next?
Not to state the obvious (Score:2)
Pfft (Score:5, Funny)
It didn't magically get bigger (Score:2)
Wrong point of view (Score:2)
I blame (Score:2)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:4, Informative)
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
Now technically speaking the weight of the object does affect the rate at which other things fall towards it. (If you drop a 2kg weight the earth "falls" upwards twice as fast as if you drop a 1kg weight, but the difference is obviously too small to be measured.) So if Apophis encounters an object close to or smaller than its own mass it will make a difference. However i'm pretty sure they aren't able to predict encounters with objects that small, so if it does happen it will be a totally unexpected event with an unknown affect on its orbit anyways.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
True, but a higher mass relative to the diameter means that solar winds have a lesser effect. Granted, that effect is small compared to the pull of Earth, Sol, Jupiter and (when close) Luna, but it might still be significant in calculating whether we're going to get hit or not.
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So we used our super advanced technology to know precisely where this asteroid will be in like 2042 or whatever but we were off by almost half its mass (or volume)? Anyone see a little disconnect there? Especially since other solar system bodies' gravitational fields will affect it differently if it weighs double what we thought. I knew it was a load of alarmist, headline-grabbing BS.
So, re-read what you said and think about that. You'll come to the conclusion that you should be quite alarmed because we don't know what might hit us when. We also didn't know about Eris, a proto-planet more massive than Pluto until 2005. That means we're pretty damn blind, and that stuff we can see we can't see very well and thus can't make very precise predictions about them.
If anything, to me that means we should be pretty concerned about this situation and seek to rectify it ASAP. We need to sw
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Given we have survived the last umpteen million years we can figure the odds are fairly low. Even for asteroids like this, it is not a planet killer. Of course humans are populating more areas in bigger numbers than we were say, a couple of thousand years ago, so anything hitting has higher odds of doing damage but the human race is fairly safe. No one knew about these until recently so knowing does make you nervous. At least they are making good progress.
And Eris is about the same size as Pluto. We coul
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Trajectories of an observed object in the solar system are comparatively project from observation, deducing mass can be trickier. So, no, I don't see a disconnect. You don't need to know its mass to know its trajectory (at least, at the level at issue, for an object of its scale given how close it passes to
Re:IMPORTANT QUESTION... apk (Score:4, Informative)
Once it's going away, how would we catch it? It'll be going 25 km/sec relative to us.
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I am a "mph" kind-of-guy, & haven't performed the conversion from kph->mph
Let me Google that for you [lmgtfy.com].
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I don't think you understand how explosions actually do their damage. An explosion in which the force is directed can be very powerful. A nuke in space is not a directed explosion, the energy flies out in all directions, most of them failing to be aimed at the asteroid. Also, notice that after the WWII nukes, there were buildings left standing. Admittedly, the ones we have now are bigger, but they don't atomize stuff very well. An a rock that big isn't going to be atomized very easily. Just to make it more
Re:IMPORTANT QUESTION... apk (Score:4, Insightful)
Simulations of nuclear weapons vs. asteroids typically show that the nukes mostly just heat the asteroid up. In space, there's no atmosphere to superheat into an airburst, so a nuclear explosion consists of the vaporised remains of the bomb and the delivery vehicle and a lot of radiation. At the speeds involved, there's only about a 50 millisecond window to even detonate a nuke near enough to an asteroid that's approaching us for it to have any effect. Even if the timing is just right, a maximum of 50% of the energy of the nuke is going to hit the asteroid, and it's really going to be more like 10%. As has been mentioned, we pretty much have to hit the asteroid on approach, because it's going to be a lot harder to catch up to while it's moving away. If we do manage to blow it up, then we go from one large body travelling in a fairly predictable path to a number of objects of varying size travelling on less predictable paths, so if it's not going to hit us, we're better off not blowing it into pieces that might hit us. Also, we might have a lot of nuclear warheads, but we don't have anywhere near as many rockets capable of getting the payload to the asteroid. Nuking it might be cathartic, but there are a lot of problems with the idea.
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The only reason to blow up the asteroid while it's heading away would be if it were coming back. But if it's coming back, blowing it up "as it goes away from us" is really just blowing it up on the way in, just further ahead of time. It's still a bad idea for exactly the same reasons, you're just executing the breakup so the shrapnel with a total mass identical to the original asteroid shotgun-blasts into the planet on the next pass rather than on this pass. If you're trying to make it not head in our di
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He made a vague prediction about a "red meteor" in 1981...mentioned no dates or size. Then in 2008 he spoke of it again, this time specifying dates and size.
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If it is within a few kilometres (=1000m) then he had a lot of wriggle room.