Newly Discovered Asteroid To Pass Within Geostationary Orbit Sunday 101
theshowmecanuck writes: A newly found asteroid the size of a house will give earth a close flyby this weekend. It will pass just below satellites in geostationary orbit, and above New Zealand around 14:18 EDT / 18:18 GMT / 06:18 NZST this coming Sunday (Monday morning in NZ). "Asteroid 2014 RC was initially discovered on the night of August 31 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, and independently detected the next night by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, located on the summit of Haleakal on Maui, Hawaii," NASA officials said in a statement.
Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the 34,000 km above earth part, but the "we discovered it a week ago" part.
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If I may borrow a line from Armageddon,
it's a big-ass sky.
Re:Soulskill is a wee-todd. Title written by moron (Score:4, Informative)
to answer GP (who I assume is an AC): geostationary is by no means arbitrary.
A geostationary orbit is one in which the orbiting body does not move relative to a point on the surface of its parent (in the context case, specifically Earth). This requires a specific orbital distance (22,236 miles*) at a specific inclination (0 to the equator), to maintain a sidereal orbital period of 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds (approximately). which is equal to the sidereal rotation period of Earth - how about that? In a two-body problem this would be simple, but we have this thing called the Moon, and this thing called the Sun, and to a lesser extent every other body with mass in the Universe, to deal with in maintaining a geostationary orbit. NBody physics introduces a certain degree of chaos to orbital predictions.
*this number is known by calculation using: cube root mu over omega squared. Refer to the Wikipedia.
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Do you even understand what the point of geostationary orbit is?
The distance involved is anything but arbitrary.
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No, not arbitrary. Very definite.
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I'm sorry, you're a moron. Sure it's arbitrary, since two orbital parameters are free and the term geostationary refers to an infinite set of orbits. Yet everyone understands that it's about the radius. Perhaps the title should have said "within the geostationary orbital radius".
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Even then that's an infinite set, since one orbital parameter (a.k.a. the orbital slot) is free. An orbit isn't a path in the sky, it's a vector in the space of orbital parameters. You can't ignore the orbital spot and pretend that all geostationary orbits are the same - all those satellites would sit on each other, then :)
I did generalize it, assuming that any orbit with a 24h period is geostationary. Perhaps that was ill advised :)
Re: Soulskill is a wee-todd. Title written by moro (Score:2)
Yes, there is a significant difference between geostationary and geosynchronous orbits.
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I did generalize it, assuming that any orbit with a 24h period is geostationary. Perhaps that was ill advised :)
Heh. Especially if you're going the wrong way.
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yes, that's a very bad assumption to make, since you can achieve a geosynchronous orbit with a periapse of 120 miles.
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Sorry, I had a brain fart :/
Completely opposite of arbitrary (Score:1)
Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:5, Insightful)
An asteroid the size of a house would have to be going extraordinarily fast to pose much of a threat to the planet as a whole.
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Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:4, Informative)
I'll worry about more likely concerns for local-scale damage.
Like say, a tornado. Today. That's more likely than a house sized asteroid hitting anywhere in my region in my lifetime.
Asteroids are primarily a concern due to the civilization terminating potential. And intrasystem asteroids the size of houses don't pose that threat.
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Let's put it this way: I'm more worried about being hit by a car than a crashing plane. Even though crashing planes are big, and dramatic and caused 9/11.
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car crashes are relatively common, and generally survivable. Plane crashes are relatively rare - and generally not survivable.
Proportionately, you're talking about the same amount of metal per passenger, the difference is kinetic energy. 60mph for a single-vehicle incident on the road, versus 600mph for a plane in a power dive. There's a LOT more energy expended in a plane crash than in a car crash, and I'm not talking about just the mass of the thing.
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Yes, apparently, we do. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30k mph. That's a reasonable amount lower than the Chelyabinsk event, given that energy is proportional to velocity squared.
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This is a question that can only really be answered with "take physics 101"
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We'll leave aside the "sucked in" bit of it. Your physics course will teach you eventually that most (all?) fields are of infinite extent, though equally, they get weaker with separation between the bodies pretty rapidly. You can also neglect the mass of the object - the greater the mass, the greater the forces produced which precisely counteracts the effect of the greater mass. (If the counteracting isn't exact, there's a Noble or several for the person
Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:4, Informative)
An asteroid the size of a house would have to be going extraordinarily fast to pose much of a threat to the planet as a whole.
It's about the same size as the Chelyanbinsk meteor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Which hit the earth with the force of about 500kilitons of TNT
Here's some video footage in case you're not terrified yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
From what I'm reading, this asteroid is going even faster, but it's hard to tell how fast it will be going if it actually hit us.
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According to your own link
"Most of which was absorbed by the upper atmosphere"
And additionally, it was unusually high velocity(did you read my post?) and an ideal entry vector.
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I don't think that "extraordinarily fast" is as extraordinary as you think it is, given our two examples.
Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:5, Funny)
Who's house we taking about here?
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Like a 30m high tsunami hitting the east cost of north and south america and the west coast of Scandinavia, Great Brittany and Ireland and the rest of Europe and Africa if it hits the Atlantic. Or is the tsunami only 5m high? Anyway, you saw what sandy did to New York, imagine a 5m high flood coming from the east.
Or likewise if it hits the Pacific or Indian Ocean. Sure if it only hits land in west siberia the kill zone is perhaps limited to a few 100km diameter. Or perhaps even only a few km ... but the cra
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Your estimates of the impact are way off for the scale of this rock, which is only 15-25 m in diameter. Even if it was quite dense rock and managed to hit at 90 degrees, it would still mostly break up in the air and you would get a spray of fragments over a couple hundred meters not strong enough to create any large crater. Even the 90 degree case in both shallow and deep water will not create tsunami more than a meter high.
The total kinetic energy of the thing in space is a couple of megatons, a lot o
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a geostationary satellite is travelling at just over 3km/sec. With average masses around 9000lb [fas.org], that's still four tons of metal doing a fair clip by the time it hits the atmosphere should it decide to suddenly come home.
Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:4, Insightful)
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They only track Neo when he is betrayed while in the Matrix.
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I would love to see footage from the time between discovery, and plotting it's exact trajectory. I wonder how many times they ran the numbers to be sure.
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Not the 34,000 km above earth part, but the "we discovered it a week ago" part.
Maybe next time around.
Re:Isn't that cutting it kinda close (Score:5, Funny)
Quick, capture it (Score:2)
if its going to be that close :)
BTW how big its it? The size of a house can vary a lot, and are we talking spuare feet, length, or mass
NZ houses aren't as big in area as american houses, and mostly made of wood, so they are not as heavy eithere.
Re:Quick, capture it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, houses obviously vary in the size of a skyscraper a few 100m hight and at its base perhaps 30m - 50m wide in each direction on one side. Or they are very small ... roughly 4m long and 5m wide and 3m high.
Pick your choice.
However you could activate your brain, look out of the window, pick a random non skyscraper and look: it has 3 floors (roughly 12m hight + a 6m high roof), has an entrance and two rooms to the right of the entrance and one room left to it. Perhaps the old victorian rooms are 3m wide t
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A ranch style transitional with a pool.
Can we see it? (Score:3, Insightful)
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No. From the article: "The asteroid will be very dim when it passes by Earth. Observers on the ground won't be able to catch sight of it with the naked eye, but, weather permitting, intrepid amateur astronomers should be able to catch a glimpse of the fast-moving space rock through telescopes, according to NASA."
Re:Can we see it? (Score:5, Informative)
You can expect a magnitude of +11.5 according to some sources. So no, definitely not visible to the naked eye. Should be easy with a good motorised telescope.
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asteroids are generally too dark to spot (there are exceptions), they're about the same colour and texture as coal to pumice. So, not very reflective.
3:2 resonance (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find cool about this asteroid is that it's in a 1.5 year orbit. That means it's in a 3:2 resonance with Earth. So it'll come by again if you miss it this time, every 3 years.
Normally you'd expect asteroids that makes this close an approach to Earth to have a bit of a change in orbital parameters after the flyby, but that 3:2 orbital ratio is unlikely to be a coincidence-- it looks like a resonant orbit, in which the Earth's gravitational perturbation has already modified the orbit until it reached that stable resonance.
The small-body page allows you to propagate the orbit into the future, if you're interested. (Not a good tool to use if you're calculating missions, though-- you'll want a more accurate simulator! The V_infinity is a bit large for a rendezvous, though.)
JPL small body orbital information page (Score:2)
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c... [nasa.gov]
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Quick! Load Kerbal Space Program!
Re:3:2 resonance (Score:4, Funny)
Already done, a quick simulation clearly shows nothing to worry about, even if it hit the atmosphere straight on it would still be decelerated to a safe velocity before hit hit the gorund and would just bounce.
That is a load off my mind.
Bounce? [Re:3:2 resonance] (Score:2)
it would still be decelerated to a safe velocity before hit hit the gorund and would just bounce.
Bounce?? This was calculated using Kermit's space program?
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nah dude, you have to try Kerbal Space Program, the asteroids follow Newtonian physics (though it's two-body, nbody is apparently too difficult) right up to the point of impact - where they bounce.
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It isn't so much a matter of n-body being too difficult, I don't think it would be that much fun to play. I mean, some people would love it sure but.... the unexpected effects on orbital stability would very likely be fun killing for a lot of the more casual players, which, lets face it.... is what is going to keep them in business.
Sure I would love some more lagrange points or to toss something into a low energy transfer path that has it being tossed from one celstial to another for no extra fuel, but, ser
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In addition to the other comment, you also have to realize two other facts about Kerbal:
it (currently, I believe its eventually planned) only adds re-rentry effects, there is no attempt to model the heat (without mods, there is "deadly re-entry" which I personally like to play with) so you can slam into the atmosphere at pretty much any velocity safely.
This is also good because, Kerbin's atmosphere (which I hope they fix) is rather odd, a little overly thin at the top, and a little overly thick at the botto
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Not to worry! Jebediah Kerman has been launched in a special purpose rocket and is on his way for rendezvous!
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What I find cool about this asteroid is that it's in a 1.5 year orbit. That means it's in a 3:2 resonance with Earth. So it'll come by again if you miss it this time, every 3 years.
One day we will turn them into space stations.
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Insane amounts of... insanity (Score:2)
Yeah, after all, what is gravity well free access to effectively infinite mineral and other resources? What's the use of long baseline telescopes (of any wavelength) without atmospheric interference? What's the use of 0-G manufacturing? What's the use of 100% availability of solar power? What's the use of heavy manufacturing where pollution is trivially and harmlessly disposable by simply pushing it into (towards) the sun? What's the use of cutting the cost of space travel to other solar locations by removi
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I mean, jeeze... such a useless idea, creating space habitats, spending whatever for no tangible results whatsoever. The NERVE! You are so right.
I just don't know what I was thinking - thanks for correcting me.
Actually 3:2 resonance? (Score:1)
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With this close approach to the Earth, couldn't its orbit be changed?
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yep. We'll send up the world's best drilling team.
Nuke It! (Score:1)
Nuff said
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-1 Off topic. We're talking about an asteroid, not the middle east.
captcha: glassed
Distance discrepency (Score:3)
All other source I've seen mention 0.0002664... AU or approx. 40'000 km. That would be above geosynchronous orbit altitude, not below.
For example, from JPL:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.c... [nasa.gov]
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Not to mention size. ... relief.
Houses vary in size by a factor of 10 easily.
No time to read -- are you sure they're not mixing imperial and metric again?
At least let's hope in all these they errr on the side of
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Being within a factor of 10 is still a good approximation. Considering volume as the most likely interpretation of size, the smallest house is unlikely to be on the order of 10 cars.
When describing objects in space, the general sizes we tend to see recurring in popular news stories are:
Car
House
Texas
Moon
Earth
Sun
While inexact and grossly approximated, this helps generally with the "how does this affect me" question that some readers may have.
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From TFA
At its close approach, the 60-foot (20 meters) asteroid will fly about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) from the center of Earth. The average radius of the Earth (the distance from the center of the planet to its surface) is about 3,959 miles (6,371 km).
Geostationary orbit is ~42,164 km [wikipedia.org] from the center of Earth, so TFS is correct based on this info.
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I think the above/below here refers to the declination [wikipedia.org] of the asteroid's trajectory, not its altitude.
Geostationary Orbit Sunday already? (Score:5, Funny)
Geostationary Orbit Sunday
I've only just recovered from Near Equatorial Tuesday!
Misleading (Score:3)
"It will pass just below satellites in geostationary orbit, and above New Zealand "
Geostationary orbit is around the equator, NZ is 40 to 45 degrees south or so.
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Think they are talking more about altitude then actually passing below a satellite.
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Oh, nitpicking again?
"Geostationary orbit" obviously refers to hight.
And there is nothing wrong having a satellite in that height over New Zealand anyway. It would simply be oscillation on that latitude between 40 (45) degrees south and the same amount north.
RC (Score:3)
For "really close"
And the next one will be the size of Texas (Score:4, Insightful)
All our hopes and dreams revolving around deflecting asteroids and comets all hinge on being able to detect them far enough out to make an intercept. Makes me think we should really reconsider the priority we put on manned space missions, particularly generational missions. Otherwise we stand a good chance of getting snuffed out as a species if we hang around here long enough. Asteroids and comets are not even the most dangerous threats we face.
Haleakala (Score:2)
Shoot it with Laser to Determine Composition! (Score:1)
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great idea, unfortunately GCMS requires intimate proximity of sample to sensor to function. The laser is just there to vapourise the sample so the sensor can actually read it.
Nobody sneeze.... (Score:1)
... and keep those sheep quiet - no bleating to change any resonant properties of anything during the flyby ;-)