Asteroid 2012 DA14 Approaches 94
Today at about 19:25 UTC (2:25 PM EST), Asteroid 2012 DA14 will make its closest approach to Earth, passing a mere 27,650 kilometers above the surface — closer than our satellites in geosynchronous orbit. NASA is broadcasting a live-steam showing the asteroid from an Observatory, and will have coverage on NASA TV starting about a half-hour before closest approach. The Planetary Society will be broadcasting a live webcast, and Phil Plait will be hosting a Google+ Hangout. NASA has also compiled a nice post filled with information about the asteroid, including trajectory diagrams, animated videos of the path, and answers to question about 2012 DA14. You can also watch it move at 50x actual speed through a telescope. They take pains to note that there is no danger of the asteroid striking the planet today, or any time in the forseeable future. Its next notably close approach in 2046 will only bring it about a million kilometers away. What makes 2012 DA14 significant is that it's rather large — it's 45 meters across and weighs about 130,000 metric tons. It's also moving about 7.8 kilometers per second relative to Earth. "To view the asteroid, you will need a good pair of binoculars, or even better, a moderately powered telescope. During the closest approach, and dependant on local weather, the asteroid will be visible from parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. The asteroid will appear to be moving relatively quickly as it crosses the sky from the south to the north." NASA says this morning's meteor event in Russia was unrelated.
I wonder if... (Score:2)
the news broadcast will be this detailed when the BIG ONE is actually about to hit?
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I don't think the reporters care all that much. I got off the phone with a reporter in Buenos Aires a minute ago, and he just hung up mid-conversation. I get the impression they aren't taking it seriously.
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
You were communicating with someone in Buenos Aires about an asteroid when the communication got cut off? I would like to know more.
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Strange plants (Score:2, Funny)
Has anyone noticed these fast grow plants? I dont remenber planting them, but my memory
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Say that when it hits earth and you're dead cause somebody couldn't do math. Let the looting begin.
??? You think the ability to solve math is a mutation that somehow enables one to alter the trajectory of an asteroid? I've got some 2+2=4 to sell you...
easy (Score:1)
Just launch a triangular ship and shoot at it in two dimensions. When you get in trouble try hyperspace.
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Just launch a triangular ship and shoot at it in two dimensions. When you get in trouble try hyperspace.
OMG! Now there are TWO asteroids! We're doomed for sure now!
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hyperspace
Pathetic Atarians, we call it the third dimension [wikimedia.org]!
Please make it brake (Score:1)
With Apologies to Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Re:With Apologies to Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
-OK Nathan, here's the setup. You, Morena, Jewel, Gina, and Summer are all in the ship. And someone releases a love drug. And next thing, all 5 of you are going to town.
-You sure this isn't some fanboy's fantasy?
-Possibly, but he's got a giant rock hanging over LA and demanding that we do this.
-Well sure. I mean...*eyeing fellow cast members*...anything to save the Earth.
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I'll be in my bunk...
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ID's most significant failing is that it is not falsifiable. But unfalsifiable does not equate to the notion that it never happened (nor does it mean that it did, actually).
ID's only significantly attractive feature is that it is the only hypothesis that there is even the slightest hope of, short of inventing time travel, actually ever finding scientific evidence of (eg, we discover the remains of an ancient advanced alien civilization somewhere, and are able to archeologically ascertain that life on e
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Let's say for a second that intelligent design proponents are right. That you are also right in that aliens created us. This doesn't answer the underlying question: why do these aliens exist? Was it evolution or intelligent design? Repeat until you're bored to death.
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This so-called "failing" of ID is equally unaccounted for in the theory of evolution, which necessitates that life itself exists in the first place.
I'm not suggesting that ID is accurate... only that, as I said, short of inventing time travel and somebody going back in time to observe it happening, it's the only hypothesis that we can probably come up with which has even the remotest hope of ever actually being validated. (Of course, what would be truly interesting is if in the process of going back in t
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Not at all.... my point was dismissing ID because it does not explain where life originally came from is just as invalid as dismissing evolution for the same reason.
But you raise a good point. ID is far more of an alternative hypothesis to abiogenesis than it is to evolution.
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Proponents of ID try to use it to explain where current life came from, while ignoring the initiation of life. Since they don't believe in evolution, it makes sense to them to focus on all the myriad ways life is now... instead of the simple one way life started.
Evolution explains where current life came from, but does not explain where/how the first biological replicator formed.
Which is to say, the "so-called failing" of ID to which you refer is not the reason that anyone takes issue with ID.
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Who says all ID proponents don't believe in evolution? The strongest case for ID isn't that evolution doesn't explain how life itself began, it's that we can't come up with a good justification for the alternative, which is to say "something mysterious happened", nor can we ever hope to actually say any more than this, since any efforts we might undertake to try to artificially recreate conditions in a lab, to see if life can really evolve "on its own" would ultimately be doomed to futility in this regard
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The strongest case for ID isn't that evolution doesn't explain how life itself began,
And the weakness in the theory of gravity is that it doesn't explain incandescence. Just because something doesn't explain something it didn't set out to explain in no way weakens the theory.
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ID does not attempt to remotely answer any "why"... it really only offers a hypothesis about "what". It's an alternative to the notion that life developed here entirely by chance. Nothing more, and nothing less. Creationism is entirely compatible with ID, but really, they aren't actually the same thing. ID only attempts to convey a notion of what happened to start life here, on this planet. Not elsewhere. It does not preclude the possibility that the originator of life here may have evolved elsew
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ID does not attempt to remotely answer any "why"...
You must hear different people talking about it than me. The "intelligence" in ID is God. Or so I'm told.
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Possibly... although I tend to hear that the "intelligence" in ID is supposedly God from people who detract from it *FAR* more often than I hear it from supporters of the notion.
Regardless, it's still an unfalsifiable premise without inventing time travel and going back to watch.
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Possibly... although I tend to hear that the "intelligence" in ID is supposedly God from people who detract from it *FAR* more often than I hear it from supporters of the notion.
That's because when everyone hears ID, they think "creation by God" so you don't have to say it. The proponents don't mention God so that when anyone else brings it up, they can claim strawman, but the ID proponents stick together because they all know "God" is the core.
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Would it not be better as a first strike for the country overall for it to hit D.C. and take out most of both parties?
Delta-V (Score:3)
I wonder how much delta-V it would take to circularize it's orbit? Surely there is something useful we could do with it?
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Re:Delta-V (Score:4, Interesting)
It's moving about 8km/s relatively, with a periapsis of about 27000km. Orbital speed at GEO is about 3km/s. It has a mass of 190000 metric tons.
You should be able to calculate the delta-V from all that.
Way Cooler (Score:1)
Re:Way Cooler (Score:5, Funny)
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ELAINE: No, no . . . but it is quite a coincidence.
RAVA: Yes, that's all, a coincidence!
ELAINE: A big coincidence.
RAVA: Not a big coincidence. A coincidence!
ELAINE: No, that's a big coincidence.
RAVA: That's what a coincidence is! There are no small coincidences and big coincidences!
ELAINE: No, there are degrees of coincidences.
RAVA: No, there are only coincidences! ..Ask anyone! (Enraged, she asks everyone in the elevator) Are there big coincidences and small coincidences, or just coincidences? (Silent) ..W
are we sure it has nothing to do with DA14? (Score:3, Interesting)
wouldn't it be possible that for every rock we see in space there are some smaller rocks held in loose gravitational formation?
these things have been out there for a very very long time. plenty of time to pick up loose junk
i mean look at pluto: every time we look at it we find a new pebble moon. pluto is not exactly a gravitational power house. it's just that the neighborhood is full of a lot of flotsam and jetsam
i wouldn't be surprised that deep space objects, no matter the size, are often loose agglomerations of stuff
i think it is very possible that this meteor very much is (was) associated with DA14
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well then we are left with extraordinarily cosmically improbable coincidence that two large objects approach the earth in a small time frame
people love to say correlation is not causation
what they forget to say is that correlation is the first step in establishing causation
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I think a lot of scientists, when they first heard about it, were totally ready to think that this was a part of DA14. But as more evidence came in, we realized that they were basically heading in opposite directions; there's no way their orbits could be related. Really all this proves is that there's a lot of space rocks out there we haven't found.
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if the loose gravitational agglomeration is large enough, it's possible for the smaller rock to pass by on the other side of the earth, swinging around and appearing to come from another direction
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if the loose gravitational agglomeration is large enough, it's possible for the smaller rock to pass by on the other side of the earth, swinging around and appearing to come from another direction
This isn't an issue of two objects "appearing to come from another direction." The problem is that the direction of travel of the two objects was tremendously different. In other words, they don't share the same orbit around the Sun. Notice that the Russian meteor isn't following a path anything like DA14's south to north path: http://attivissimo.blogspot.com/2013/02/russian-meteor-path-plotted-in-google.html [blogspot.com].
Re:are we sure it has nothing to do with DA14? (Score:4, Informative)
No... if that meteorite was in an orbit 30,000km radius from DA14 (which it would have to have been in order to hit Russia when it did), its orbital velocity would necessarily have to be very low. As in, so slow it would take millenia to complete even one orbit. Since DA14 is moving at a whopping 30km/second relative to Earth, anything orbiting it that far out would be moving in virtually the same direction and speed with respect to us.
In short, there's no way that meteorite could have been orbiting DA14
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The object that entered over Russia was not "large", at least not in the sense 2012 DA14 is.
If they were related there would likely be many more entry events before and after 2012 DA14.
And the coincidence is not nearly as improbably as you suggest, the Earth suffers many entry events each day of varying sizes. This was a bit bigger than most, but certainly not unheard of. The most unusual thing about it is that it was captured on video.
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no, the one over russia was very rare. it was very large
the tunguska event in 1908, ironically also over siberia, is the last time we had something as large or larger, a century ago
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no, the one over russia was very rare. it was very large
the tunguska event in 1908, ironically also over siberia, is the last time we had something as large or larger, a century ago
Citation needed. The Tunguska event came from an object on the order of 100 meters in diameter (http://web.utk.edu/~comet/papers/nature/TUNGUSKA.html). The early estimate I saw from NASA of today's meteor's diameter was 10 meters in diameter. That's a 1000x difference in volume, making your comparison pretty extreme.
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Sorry, you're simply not correct. Tunguska released energy equivalent to 10 - 20 Megatons (very rough estimate) and flattened over 2,000sq KM for forest. Thousands would be *dead* if this was even remotely that scale of event, not merely cut with shards of glass.
Events of the size seen today happen roughly every 10 years or so, maybe more since if they happen over the ocean we might not detect it at all and until recently always-on video recording devices have been pretty rare.
2012 DA14 (~50m) is likely no
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While it is a strange coincidence that this happen
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the experts weren't even looking for the russian rock. there's no data on it except for the moment of impact
if the loose gravitational agglomeration is large enough, it's possible for the smaller rock to pass by on the other side of the earth, swinging around and appearing to come from another direction
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"On the cosmological scale, it's all relative" - Septimus Signus
Sorry, just picked up Skyrim again after almost a year. But, if your point is that at one point in time, very far off, these two 'hunks of rock' may have been attached then I suppose you're correct. I mean, if the Big Bang was an explosion of matter in space (at one point in time), these hunks of rock may have been very close to the matter that makes up yours or my body at one point. However, I'll trust NASA if they say that for our purposes,
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So dead satellites and broken satellite parts as a result of micrometeor impacts are among the flotsam, and the orbiting boosters and other debris are jetsam. I don't see why the phrase doesn't apply here.
Sure... (Score:3)
...except for its completely different orbital path, direction of entry into Earth's atmosphere, and timing of the encounter with Earth, all of which definitively prove that it is not related to 2012 DA14 [npr.org].
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Ustream claims capacity for 3.3 million viewers (Score:2)
Over 300,000 watching the live feed from Ustream right now. Come on Slashdot, we can break 'em!
On another note, it's funny that the asteroid shows as a streak on camera. Most of astronomy is about long exposures, so the camera at the Gingin Observatory apparently isn't very fast at all. This particular event is radically faster than most of what astronomy observes. If the watching of large rocks becomes a world-wide pastime, observatories are going to start wanting budgets to add a high speed camera.
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If the watching of large rocks becomes a world-wide pastime, observatories are going to start wanting budgets to add a high speed camera.
Sadly, I doubt there is much reason to fear that.
Flash Gordon (Score:1)
Just your friendly neighborhood physicist (Score:1)
This asteroid won't do squat. Even if it was coming directly at us. Seriously. Don't panic, don't freak out, don't lose any sleep over a 45m asteroid barreling towards earth at a "break-neck" 7.8 km/s. If someone is screaming "THE END IS NIGH!!! THE ASTEROID WILL KILL US ALL!!!!" point at them and laugh in their face.
The following is backed by SCIENCE:
https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
If we assume that the asteroid is made of pure freaking iron, comes in head on, is moving at 11 km/s, smacks into crystallin
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Cool tool. Can you summarize the important assumptions being made?
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I'd be interested to know if anyone can spot something that would make this simulation invalid in the case of 2012 DA14. I just searched through and copy-pasted excerpts containing the word assumption for effect, but have no idea how important any of these are:
"To implement such a program, it is necessary to make some simplifying assumptions that limit the accuracy of any predictions."
https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/Content/pdf/Documentation.pdf [purdue.edu]
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Asteroid 2012-DA14 is
Video and interactive WebGL animations (Score:4, Informative)
T Minus 5 minutes till Impact (Score:2)
...and counting.
Whoosh! (Score:2)
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Um, asteroids don't make sounds.
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They have always made kind of a dull rumbling sound when I shoot them.
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You said that just to get another whoosh, didn't you?
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;)
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It's a streaming video. In space, nobody can hear you stream.
I hope we get more coverage like this. (Score:2)
If it hit us... a good thing? (Score:1)