NASA Says Asteroid Will Buzz Earth Closer Than Many Satellites 225
coondoggie writes "NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15 closer than many man-made satellites. NASA added that while the asteroid, designated 2012 DA14, has no chance of striking Earth. Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, astronomers have never seen an object so big come so close to our planet."
Call Bruce Willis (Score:4, Funny)
Chuck norris was too busy saving us from north korea, to also blow up the asteroid heading for earth.
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Chuck Norris doesn't believe in asteroids, because they are not consistent with young earth creationism. His one weakness!
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That's no asteroid: Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked half the football field from Falcons Stadium into heliocentric orbit, after they beat the Seahawks in the playoffs.
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Not blow up. Deliver a roundhouse kick and shatter it. See long problem 5 here:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_1_review.php [duke.edu]
I wouldn't be surprised if the asteroid is going to miss Earth because, you know, word gets around. Don't mess with Earth. Chuck Norris is waiting.
rgb
Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001569/bio [imdb.com]
"He is a black belt in Tang Soo Do and Tae Kwan Do. In 1969, he earned the Triple Crown for the highest number of tournament wins, and was named Fighter of the Year by "Black Belt" magazine. By the time he was 34, Norris had established 32 karate schools and had been a champion for six years. In 1996, he became the first Westerner to be awarded an eighth-degree black belt in Tae Kwan Do"
I am not a big fan of this guy, and i agree these Chuck Norris jokes are very annoying, however, facts are facts and clearly you are wrong about the martial arts.
Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score:5, Interesting)
Martial Arts is a broad term, and most people (like you) only pay attention to the "Martial" part. The Style that Chuck specializes in and teaches in his schools is focused on rigid adherence to the traditional Forms, and application of mental Discipline. They are as well-suited to an open fighting situation as disciplines classified as Fighting Styles, which is why you don't see people using pure forms in competitions like the UFC... winners often have a background from a variety of styles which is why they are called "mixed martial arts" competitions.
Not to say that people like Chuck and Bruce Lee aren't pretty mean fighters, anybody with that much training is not going to be an easy mark. But I'd put almost anybody who fights in the large UFC competitions against a pure style fighter any day, especially if they aren't in a ring with time limits and rules.
Having said all that, it's important to note that Chuck, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and other popular film fighters have to slow down most of their moves so the audience can follow the action, and what they actually do on screen are sequences and styles you wouldn't ever actually use in real life combat. Many of the "moves" they display for the camera are not actually combat moves, but rather are meditative Forms designed to build endurance, focus, and strength.
universal version (Score:3)
Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think I'd classify Bruce Lee in with anyone who focus(ed) on "ridged adherence to the traditional forms". If anything he's the reason we have MMA and UFC. He did everything he could to strip away what he deemed unnecessary. I don't know what Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan are doing these days, but they both learned a lot from Bruce Lee when he was alive.
Agreed regarding the moves that you typically see in movies. They are rarely something that you would see being used off screen. I know that they all have to slow down for movies. I've heard that Bruce Lee had to slow down due to the limitations of the film at the time. I'm sure it also had to do with his movies being shot on low budget equipment too. But if you ever saw any of his demonstrations you'd understand the guy was scary quick.
Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who studied Kempo many many moons ago, I wholly agree with Bruce's outlook. What I was taught was extremely rigid, canned moves that might work if you were extremely lucky enough for an attacker to come at you in precisely the manner they trained you for, but if they deviated at all, if all you had to rely on were the moves you were taught (and you couldn't improvise on your own), you'd be toast. Though I'm not sure if this reflects more on Kempo itself, or the school I attended.
Though this leads me to wonder why we have this prevalent Chuck Norris meme, but not one for Bruce Lee?
Re:Call Bruce Lee (Score:4, Funny)
That's just because Bruce did not have the +10 Manly Beard of Manliness.
No chance of striking Earth (Score:4, Insightful)
"... has no chance of striking Earth"
Famous last words.
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No, they won't be famous at all if they're last.
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Re:No chance of striking Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
Famous last words.
Because the laws of dramatic irony obviously trump the laws of physics.
Re:No chance of striking Earth (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just saying.
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The interesting thing is that even if it was going to hit the Earth, they would still be telling us the exact same thing most likely due to how our Governments view the need to "protect" us for our own good.
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If you consider the panic and chaos that would ensue from an announcement of an extinction level event, yeah, it is probably better for them to say nothing or lie about it. Seriously, what would people do if there were a credible statement that the world would end on Feb 15th? A lot of people would take it as a license to do anything they please to anyone they choose.
I would prefer to live out my last days peacefully, oblivious of impending doom.
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Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
And the best vantage point.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And the best vantage point.. (Score:5, Funny)
On the actual asteroid.
Re:And the best vantage point.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Television or the internet. They'll have great footage made by professional astronomers, along with commentaries from said astronomers. As opposed to you sitting in your garden with a pair of binos, seeing nothing at all and freezing your balls off while your wife screams at you because you're late for dinner.
Re:And the best vantage point.. (Score:5, Funny)
Ehh... I have battery power heated thermal socks I will put over my balls. They will be fine. As for the wife, if she isn't passed out drunk, she will never get her fat ass off the couch long enough to make dinner.
Unfortunately, my binoculars are broken because the neighbor thought I was looking through the window when his wife was getting out of the shower. Of course I wasn't, I was watching the TV in their bedroom in an attempt to get away from my wife.
But hey, I'm still interested in standing in the garden looking at nothing if you want to tell me which direction I should stare at.
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while your mom screams at you because you're late for dinner
Fixed that for you.
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He married his mom?
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If you've got the equipment, have a look in person, but then if you have the equipment you probably already know that. It'd be a stretch for a novice with binoculars, and naked eye is right out.
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I just reacted to the idea that a little bit of effort and freezing should result in staying in front of your TV instead.
Buy your pre-manufactured food, watch the TV, pay your taxes. Anything else is DSM-IV coded behavior.
Yeah, about that... (Score:2)
Isn't this the asteroid that they found they were off by an order of magnitude on the size of a month or so back? Yeah, I wonder if they used the old mass or the corrected mass when they estimated the ballistic trajectory, because, you know, that might make a bit of a difference in just how far it'll miss by...
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Why would a change in mass change the trajectory? Granted, it was a while since I took physics, but from what I remember:
1. The force of gravity follows F = GMm / (r^2) where M and m are the masses of the two objects in consideration. Here I will use m as the mass of the asteroid and M as the mass of any other object that is not the asteroid.
2. F = ma.
3. From this follows that a = (GMm / (r^2)) / m = GM / (r^2). As we can see, m (the mass of the asteroid)
This means means that the accelleration of an object
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If the object fragments in the Earth's gravitational field then the resulting objects will definitely have different trajectories. Some parts of the asteroid could finish up in earth orbit.
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It could be like Comet_Shoemaker Levy 9 [wikipedia.org] but on a smaller scale. I think the risk is quite small and I don't think any change in the estimated mass is relevant.
Re:Yeah, about that... (Score:4, Informative)
The trouble is that what happened to Shoemaker Levy 9 doesn't scale down: it was ripped apart by the tidal forces of a gas giant, and those forces don't exist for a similar size of body interacting with Earth.
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It's not so much of a change in mass, it's a complete screwup in how they figured it, as in they found that pretty much everything they'd assumed about it to that point was wrong, including but not limited to actual distance and mass.
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is only affected directly by the other object's mass, not by the object's own mass.
I am by no means any type of astrophysicist, but my understanding of gravity (in this context) was that a mutual attraction usually happens.
Maybe that would account for the change in trajectory?
Or am I misinterpreting something here?
I agree that will not change things significantly, but only on a measurable or calculable scale. :-)
BTW, I am not singling you out here, but what volume is a football field (or half of a football field in TFS), or even better, what mass?
I realise you were just going with the flo
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I wonder if they used the old mass or the corrected mass when they estimated the ballistic trajectory, because, you know, that might make a bit of a difference in just how far it'll miss by...
No, it wouldn't. As Galileo demonstrated for centuries ago.
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Remember the thing about a feather and a bowling ball falling at the same speed in a vacuum?
I am pretty sure that there were no bowling balls on Apollo 15.
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Correct, they used a hammer.
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Had we been talking about what the acceleration was, you'd be absolutely right. The problem is CPA is a DISTANCE, properly determined by a solution of the Law of Universal Gravitation, f=Gm1m2/d^2, and some integration to determine the relative minima and maxima of f, and when d < r (earth), we have BIG problems.
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Then again, it's not my native language so maybe that sentence sounds perfectly normal to native speakers.
Hmmm....let me say it this way:
If waddgodd's sentence were a rubber band, I would not perform that level of stretching near my person. The impact when it snapped would be painful.
It is missing proper punctuation, in my opinion, and could be improved with a lot of editing.
Word choice in that sentence was spectacularly terrible.
Trust me, that sentence would have any English teacher in the USA upset.
But, I find myself intrigued by that sentence.
I find myself perplexed when trying to describe all that is wrong
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It makes anyone who speaks the language cringe because it's difficult to understand, not because it's grammatically incorrect. There are masses of ugly grammatically correct sentences. One of the charms of English is being able to call them out as ugly.
If you try, you can easily make grammatically correct sentences that no one will understand. This [wikipedia.org] is a well known example.
Odd tag (Score:2)
While all you grammarians are pecking away here I thought I'd ask a question: why does Slashdot have a "commasplice" tag for stories like this? There doesn't seem to be a common denominator for the stories which have it, judging by their headlines. The secondary headline for this one does use a commasplice. But why have a tag for that? For the benefit of those with extra dog eared copies of Strunk and White?
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That link has me buffaloed.
But I think a better example of perfectly fine English that is too slippery to understand comes from Bilbo Baggins' Party speech:
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you, half as well as you deserve.
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I am a native speaker of English, and I do find the the way that sentence was constructed to be somewhat unusual, and not entirely consistent with English grammar.
It does raise a couple of interesting questions: what, exactly, is the "size of a month"? And are months on near Earth asteroids so greatly different in size than other months?
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I'm fluent in Polish (my native language) and it also has an incredibly flexible syntax, possibly more so than English. In fact, word ordering is one of the ways to control emphasis in Polish.
We know. Thats how we got Polish notation.
Football field unit. (Score:2)
Is this unit measured in 2D?
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Re:Football field unit. (Score:5, Interesting)
A soccer field doesn't have any size defined. It's just "between 90 and 120m" long and "between 45 and 90m" wide. So btw the smallest and biggest field, there is almost a factor of 2.7 in area. That's a bit of a margin!
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Still no height defined, so it would have no volume or mass.
We are quite safe.
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Maybe its that two dimensional prison thing from the original superman movies. Could be a whole lot of bad guys inside having a Bad Time,
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Still no height defined, so it would have no volume or mass.
We are quite safe.
"Still no height defined" implies "no volume of mass defined", it does not imply "no volume or mass".
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But paper beats rock, so we are still doomed. Launch the giant scissors!
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Still no height defined, so it would have no volume or mass.
We are quite safe.
Well, unless it slices the Earth in two, or something!
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The journalists are to be commended for coming up with a analogy that appropriately captures the uncertainty
Nasa says [nasa.gov]
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Worse: its Aussie rules.
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aussie rules football is oxymoronic ;P
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Can't argue with you there.
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It could be worse. You could be a moose in a conoe going over/through the Bear Whizz Waterfall, after having bit my sister.
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So, its diameter is the same as the smallest dimension of an American football field, i.e. it would fit inside one if it was spherical.
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Assume a spherical football field...
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Hurrah, it's already in a vaccum!
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Gah!
It's hogsheads per fathom, or if yer a landlubber, hogsheads per hectare!
And on a serious note, no matter the thickness of a football field, the USA football field will out-mass the football field of anyone else due to the players! ;-)
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The chains are only used to measure first down.
Re:Football field unit - Turtles all the way down (Score:2)
Bad news (Score:2)
They had to use that unit (Score:2)
They had to use the football field unit, because elephants don't fly so high.
Is there a chance of it hitting a satellite? (Score:2)
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I could imagine it stirring up some existing orbital debris. Turning big chunks into small chunks and changing their trejectories.
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I can't authoritatively state, but I suspect that the satellite distribution is more concentrated at the LEO end of the scale and much rarer at geo-stationary orbit distance. And I bet the asteroid pass is much higher than LEO.
Re:Is there a chance of it hitting a satellite? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, geostationary orbit is about 250,000 km in circumference, and it contains about 400 satellites at present. Assuming they're each 50m wide (which is probably an exaggeration) then the satellites, in total, cover 20km of that circumference. So if we were to assume that all the satellites are in the same plane, and that the asteroid was definitely going to come in through that plane, then the chances of the asteroid meeting one of those satellites is 0.008%.
A back of the envelope calculation suggests you have the same odds of spinning around in a circle with your eyes shut and successfully pointing at a person standing 3km away.
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Well, geostationary orbit is about 250,000 km in circumference, and it contains about 400 satellites at present. Assuming they're each 50m wide (which is probably an exaggeration) then the satellites, in total, cover 20km of that circumference. So if we were to assume that all the satellites are in the same plane, and that the asteroid was definitely going to come in through that plane, then the chances of the asteroid meeting one of those satellites is 0.008%.
A back of the envelope calculation suggests you have the same odds of spinning around in a circle with your eyes shut and successfully pointing at a person standing 3km away.
Thanks, that's a very informative way of putting it into perspective. If I owned a satellites I would not be over-worried but would probably buy some insurance!
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The asteroid might even be very beneficial! I imagine that it might knock a lot of space junk out of orbit, either decaying or escaping or just being bug-splatted to the front of asteroid and carried off.
I wonder how much gravitational pull it will have on objects in its path, how will it affect* things that it doesn't physically touch.
*Need coffee, had to google whether it was affect/effect, to avoid the wrath of grammar nazis...
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TFA claimed it would not likely hit any satellites, for what that is worth....
Look on the bright side (Score:2)
If there has been a miscalculation and it actually ends up on an intersect trajectory, you may find that you no longer feel dejected about not getting a Valentine's card.
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No, instead I'll finally stop feeling dejected because for over 40 years our space programs have been loosing steam, creeping along slow as molasses, when it's perfectly clear that we're still blind as bats and more defenseless than kittens when it comes to space.
That's a heartache I feel EVERY day, not just Valentine's. Candies and shit?! Are you serious? It's 100% garaunteed WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE from one of these damned rocks (if something else doesn't get us first) if we don't do something! The
Cite the NASA story, not some parasite's blog (Score:5, Informative)
Why source a story sourced from NASA to some wanker's blog in Network World"?Presuambly this asshole just submitted it himself to get more pageviews.
The actual NASA story is Record Setting Asteroid Flyby [nasa.gov] And it actually tells you that "On Feb. 15th an asteroid about half the size of a football field will fly past Earth only 17,200 miles above our planet's surface." (Sadly even NASA use the inane "football field" measure, but goes on to say "It measures some 50 meters wide".)
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What's inane about it? I don't have a ready shorthand of things x metres across in my head to get a grasp of the scale, so they're doing me a favour. For nontechnical readers they're making it slightly more tangable than "space thing you don't understand is flying near Earth".
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What's inane about it? I don't have a ready shorthand of things x metres across in my head
Well, I don't have a mental shorthand of what kind of "football field" the guy is talking about. Anyway, you could as easily say 50 yards which is an actual unit in the real world that everyone knows, even if they don't watch football.
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Re:Cite the NASA story, not some parasite's blog (Score:5, Funny)
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It's like a meter, but the white version.
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The... white version?
Where the hell do you think we (caucasians) came from?
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you must be new here
Yeah, that's why his user number is less than 1 million. It's because he's new here. Cooney? Is that you? Tool!
China (Score:2)
Didn't you say that you wanted to capture an asteroid? Here is your chance, go for it.
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Extinction event.
Impact would not be a significant risk (Score:3)
per Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_DA14 [wikipedia.org]
2.5MT, less than Tunguska, numerous volcanos, etc. Really, would need to hit some population to get attention, and most of the planet is not populated by humans because of excessive standing water.
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TFA was an infomercial for that outfit that was talking about mining asteroids, but why not?
I have an idea (Score:2)
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It measures some 50 meters wide, neither very large nor very small, and is probably made of stone, as opposed to metal or ice.
What is the going rate for stone? To catch it would require a lot of effort, even if the asteroid was pure gold, it might not be worth it.
Half a football field? (Score:2)
Which half? The home teams half or the visiting teams half?
Seriously though, can't they find some 3d object of the appropriate size for a comparison, rather than a 2d surface
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They're going to use radar to map the asteroid, which will give us a complete 3D picture of it at much higher resolution than the HST can give - the distances in space are enormous, even supposing Hubble was easily capable of tracking this asteroid (it isn't, the asteroid is moving too fast) the biggest it gets is about 10-15 pixels large. And considering that HST is in an orbit about 550km above the surface of the earth, and the asteroid is passing us by at 25000km it's not even that much "closer" to it th
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Orbital dynamics, you do not understand them.