Newly Discovered 60-foot Asteroid About To Buzz By Earth 68
An asteroid nicknamed "Pitbull" and detected by the University of Arizona observatory atop Mt. Lemmon on August 31st will make a close approach to Earth Sunday; it's predicted to pass at a distance of about 25,000 miles, and to pass over New Zealand. According to the article, The asteroid is a similar size to the rock which caused enormous damage to the city of Chelyabinsk in Siberia. Last year's explosion generated the equivalent energy of more than 20 atomic bombs detonating and left more than 1,000 people injured while damaging thousands of buildings. Astronomers at Nasa, who track the movements of the more than 11,000 near-Earth objects, are confident Pitbull will not strike the planet.
60 feet... means what? (Score:1)
So let's say it hit 5 miles off the coast of San Francisco.. what would happen?
And whatif it hit in the center of the US, on land? Are we talking a loud noise? A meteor crater type of thing? The end of the world?
Please tell me how scared I need to be for next time! Thanks!
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According to Wikipedia:
The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 50 meters (160 feet) across.
Source [wikipedia.org]
So this is less diameter, but maybe was a different material or moving faster/slower or at a different angle.. so I dunno.
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I think this was already answered in various posts in the comments for the last Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org]. There were comments like:
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 of which is lost upon hitting the atmosphere before even breaking up. You're not going to get devastation orders of magnitude larger than a large nuclear weapon under worst case scenario. And if it comes in at something less than a 90 degree angle, you could end up with something like the Chelyabinsk meteor, since this is nearly the same size and a bit faster.
You can check things like this for yourself using an impact effects calculator [ic.ac.uk] from Imperial College, which agrees with the quoted comment.
As far as the linked crater in the parent post, that would have been for a meteor with 15 times the volume of this one, and as it was a nickel-iron meteorite, it would be about as dense as it gets, so this one wouldn't be denser. Although the
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https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/s... [nasa.gov]
I believe that in general water impacts are considered more dangerous. Unlike air, water will transmit the energy over greater distances and the tsunami can do more damage than an impact itself.
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It would result in headlines starting "Near the coast, the ruins formerly known as San Francisco..."
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"...have been hit by a meteor."
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"...causing about ten Dollars worth of damage."
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"...causing about ten million dollars worth of improvements."
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::spudhead:: GPP said San Francisco, not North Haverbrook. :D
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Go away! There ain't no monorail and there never was!
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You can shoot your own impacts here
http://www.purdue.edu/impactea... [purdue.edu]
or here
http://simulator.down2earth.eu... [down2earth.eu]
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Re: Why waste the opportunity? (Score:2)
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Sorry (Score:2)
My comet materia was lost
Holy Dupe, Batman (Score:5, Informative)
This thing left Earth space six hours ago! It'll be closer to Mars than us by the time I make my first pot of Coffee on Monday.
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So... we're safe?
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That is a lot of energy. Has anyone studied using the energy for space travel?
Unless you are converting ice to fuel what energy is that? Kinetic energy, a glancing impact sending you off on some vector (pool table physics)?
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For about 5 seconds.
Because that's as much time as it takes you to realize you'd spend just as much (more, actually) energy to rendezvous with it, only to find out that it's now (relative to you) a stationary chunk of inert materials.
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Oh, well it could well be made up of platinum or whatever, but that's not going to get you any energy usable for propulsion out of it.
If the intent is to capture resources, that's different. This twerp was asking about using it for travel. Completely different mission profile. ... oh, and I'm a space nutter myself, thank you very much.
1 week's warning (Score:1)
Re:1 week's warning (Score:4, Informative)
Now what could we possibly have done in such a short time, should it have been heading directly towards us?
We couldn't stop it, but we could predict the impact site, and take action to minimize damage. In the unlikely event that the impact site was populated, people in the area could remove fragile items from shelves, move into shelter, and stay away from windows that might shatter.
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Now what could we possibly have done in such a short time, should it have been heading directly towards us?
Evacuate 20 miles from the expected point of impact. Its not a dinosaur-killer, its much smaller than the meteor crater object. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/s... [nasa.gov]
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You're missing the point...
What if we had 1 week warning of the dinosaur-killer?
The implied point is that perhaps we should be putting some effort into getting more warning and finding all the dino killers (and frankly, stuff a lot small than that rock was).
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Well personally, assuming that there was no safe place to send them, I'd take the week off work and spend it with my dinosaurs just to let them know how much I appreciated my time with them.
I'd probably need a little more time off work after that too. Thankfully my boss is pretty generous with bereavement leave.
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The implied point is that perhaps we should be putting some effort into getting more warning and finding all the dino killers (and frankly, stuff a lot small than that rock was).
That is in fact what NASA has been doing for the past two decades: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ [nasa.gov] They have found about 90% of the 1-km or larger class. Chixulub the dino killer is estimated at 6 km, and impact energy scales as the cube of diameter. Unfortunately, asteroid tracking doesn't help with long-period comets. Those come in from the dark reaches of the outer Solar System, and therefore cannot be found until they are within a couple of years of hitting us.
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We already are [wikipedia.org], but NASA gets far less funding [sciencebuzz.org] than fucking around over in various shitholes around the world.
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Yes, my implied point was that perhaps we should take a few hundred million from the military and give it to NASA. :)
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carried on as normal, since such a vector would result in the asteroid passing through our wake. The ones you want to worry about are the ones that intersect at a point in the future, our orbital path where we're going to be at the same time as that intersection occurs.
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Was my biggest concern. Shortly after it got discovered was concluded that won't hit us. But we got a short time notice, in the case that it would be precisely calculated where it would land, and that be over/near a big city (even with the low odds of it), would be no way to stop it, and for some scale of cities 1 week of advice won't be enough (or will do by itself enough damage).
We should hope that bigger/more damaging rocks should be more visible and that we get aware of them with more anticipation, but
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Now what could we possibly have done in such a short time
Forget our petty differences, reconcile with the irreconcilable, forgive the unforgivable, relish the memories, and then throw the most epic party in the history of our planet as one united people planet-wide.
Go out with a raised glass of whatever beverage you prefer in one hand and a joint in the other!
Nasa? (Score:2)
I know this is a nitpick, but this is a site for nerds after all. It's NASA.
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That's how Jar Jar would spell it.
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Pitbull (Score:1)
More like a Chihuahua.
A Chihuahua is going to nip and screw your ankles up. Take out a city.
A Pitbull will tear your ass up beyond repair. Extinction level event.
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A Pitbull will tear your ass up beyond repair.
Umm, I don't let my dog do that to me.
You'll need a simple telescope (Score:2)
The event won't be bright enough for binoculars, but with a magnitude of up to 12, it should be visible with a simple telescope.
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Equivalent to the energy of 20 atomic bombs? (Score:1)
And yet, somehow, the city still stands...
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Cause science?
It detonated about 30km above Earth, and most of the kinetic energy was absorbed by the atmosphere. If the detonation happened *in* or near a city, the devastation would have been what you'd imagine it would have been, rather than what it really was -- an atmospheric explosion in one of the most remote inhabited areas of the planet.
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"it is very disingenuous"
Disagree completely.
The verbiage is very clear. When the meteor exploded, it had a kinetic energy measurement. That measurement was approximated to equivalent of 20 or so Hiroshima equivalent atomic bombs. The meteor itself, as a whole, did not impact the earth - as a car would have impacted (whatever) in an accident -- instead, it exploded into many smaller pieces, some of which made it to Earth. To match your analogy, the meteor's explosive kinetic energy is a meaningless measurem
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purely guess-work, but perhaps 19.9 of those atom-bomb-units were spent by the fragments passing through the atmosphere?
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An "atomic bomb unit" is a very loose concept, based on the yield of the obsolete Hiroshima bomb. this graph [wikipedia.org] shows the yield of various atomic bombs of the USA. This meteor, with a yield of about 440 kt of TNT, would be smack in the middle of the distribution, with bombs ranging from 100 times less powerful to 100 times more powerful. So it was a very powerful explosion. It's good it happened so far up.
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I've been to Managua, and I prefer Detroit. If it blew up the city, it would be an improvement.
Short notice (Score:1)
Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids? Anyone who finds themselves assuming that some agency has this taken care of?
On the one hand, I say, "Hey, it's 2014. We should see these months or even years ahead of time. Furthermore, we should have an asteroid defense system. Don't ask me exactly what. But it's 2014, man."
On the other hand, I say, "Hey's it's only sixty feet wide. How could we possibly have seen it much sooner in the whole sky surrounding the earth? We're not so advanced.
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Is anyone else unnerved by the short notice of passing asteroids?
No, because we're getting early warning of near inconsequential asteroids. That indicates that we have decent early warning. You do want to know that at least you're detecting this stuff before it hits.
Wow, two on the same day! (Score:2)
Or is the same asteroid making two passes?
Matter of coice (Score:1)
are confident Pitbull will not strike the planet. (Score:1)
Then why did you name it pitbull? "don't worry he won't bite"