Asteroid Whizzing By Earth 6 Times Closer Than the Moon (cnet.com) 203
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: The problem with asteroids passing near Earth is that they're often difficult to spot. Fortunately the hardest ones to see in our neighborhood also tend to be the smaller ones. Such is the case with 2017 BH30, which was discovered Sunday by the Catalina Sky Survey just hours before passing by us at the creepy-close distance of only 40,563 miles (65,280 kilometres). This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet (4.6-10 metres) in length, making it somewhere between the size of a truck and a... big truck. That's pretty small by asteroid standards, but it's also the closest spotted asteroid to pass us since September when asteroid 2016 RB1 passed within 24,000 miles (about 39,000 kilometres) of our planet's surface, putting it almost as close as satellites in geosynchronous orbit. This is the third asteroid to buzz by earth closer than the distance to the moon this year. We don't expect a closer pass by one of these visitors until October, when asteroid 2012 TC4 could come more than twice as close.
Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't help it, but those reports have been increasing in numbers rapidly. Either NASA needs money or our detectors have been improving considerably lately.
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well at 40K miles its about 10 earth radii. A dart thrown at that radius has about a 1% chance of intersecting within the earth's atmosphere. Since we haven't had a major earth impact in a couple hundred years one might guess that similarly close events are something like 10,000 years apart if they were random events. Thus observing more than one in your life suggests they are not random.
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The Chelyabinsk meteor 2013 was about 20 metres, which is already larger than that. And the Tunguska event 1908 was a 60 to 190 metres object. The smaller the object the more common they are.
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What incredibly destructive thing were we about to do 8.48 years ago?
Well, let's see... [wikipedia.org]
The United States and the Czech Republic sign an initial agreement to base a United States missile defense system in the Czech Republic. (AP via Google News) Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responds to this development, "We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods." (The Times)
Dammit!
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The nearest star outside our solar system is Proxima Centauri at 4.24 light years. What incredibly destructive thing were we about to do 8.48 years ago?
"Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest." Bion of Borysthenes.
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I think it's an experiment by the aliens to determine if we're smart enough to survive or not. A test, if you will.
If we were smart, now that we have the tech to see these NEO asteroids and maybe do something about them, we'd be a little alarmed after seeing so many coming so close, plus one actually hitting us (the Russian impact a few years ago in Chelyabinsk (sp?)), and would be investing real resources into not only looking for these things, but also building systems to counter these threats, such as r
I wonder what we're doing that we shouldn't be... (Score:2)
Maybe they're warning shots?
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Maybe they're warning shots?
"Here boy! Fetch!"
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I can't help it, but those reports have been increasing in numbers rapidly. Either NASA needs money or our detectors have been improving considerably lately.
Don't worry, Trump is going to ban them.
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Just because you cannot save everyone does not mean everyone has to die.
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Re:Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, even avoiding mass panic for a mostly-harmless air-burst (or perhaps making nuclear weapons trigger fingers less itchy) with a heads up might be worth it, and, if we did find out with decades of warning, we'd have one hell of a fire under our ass to come up with a solution, so who knows what we might come up with.
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Re: Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:2)
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Re:Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually most asteroids orbit the sun and pass by the earth's orbit on the way in and out. So if we found one on the way in that could hit us on the way out, we could do something about it. Or if we determine the orbit could allow it to hit us the next time it comes through then we could do something about it.
Ignoring this would make us no better than the dinosaurs.
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Screw that, I'm supporting #GiantMeteor2020. It appears to be the only sane choice at this point...
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Screw that, I'm supporting #GiantMeteor2020. It appears to be the only sane choice at this point...
Agree. It's time to shake things up in Washington and eliminate the power structure of corrupt Republicrats, and a giant meteor strike is what we need!
Re:Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:4, Informative)
Except it's not just about one-time interactions. These bullets come back. A close miss today might alert us to an impending hit later on, and give us time to prepare. It's not always just about "incoming now."
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Except it's not just about one-time interactions. These bullets come back. A close miss today might alert us to an impending hit later on, and give us time to prepare. It's not always just about "incoming now."
Not really related, but "Men of Good Will" by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis; written in the middle of the cold war; a brief skirmish between parties from the American and Russian moon bases, with a lot of shots fired harmlessly, results in a permanent cloud of bullets in very low orbit around the moon, with enough random deflections every orbit to keep everybody too busy ducking and patching holes to indulge in any more aggression.
Re:Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:5, Informative)
It is pointless to spend a lot of money on this technology,
Except that "a lot of money" is not required. The equipment used already exists, and even most of the data is already available. It just needs to be analysed to look for the NEOs.
Sounds great in theory but in practice it's not going to do you any good.
Except there is plenty we can do. Even with a few hours warning, we can tell people to get away from windows and remove stuff from shelves. Flying glass was the biggest source of injuries from the Chelyabinsk impact.
Other short term precautions:
1. Stop trains, so they don't come off the track.
2. Stop additional cars from entering tunnels.
3. Pretension seismic dampers in tall structures
4. Sound an alarm to warn people in warehouses and stores to move away from shelves.
5. Pull up automatic safely webbing to prevent pallets from falling off racks.
6. Stop and lower cargo on forklifts.
7. Start powering down heavy machinery
8. Stop people from entering elevators
9. Open fire station doors, so they don't jam closed.
10. Shutdown the flames in furnaces and water heaters
11. Start reducing gas pressure in pipelines.
12. Warn people on beaches to start moving to higher ground.
13. Start backup diesels for emergency services.
14. Retract the control rods from nuclear reactors.
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14. Retract the control rods from nuclear reactors.
Oops. I meant insert control rods into nuclear reactors.
That's what the boss at Chernobyl said (Score:3)
I think that's exactly what the boss at Chernobyl said. :)
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Re:Are there more or do we just find more? (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot: 15. Create huge panic and looting.
Panics rarely happen, and happen much less with longer term warnings. During a crisis, people tend to cooperate and bond together. This is one area where real life diverges from the movies.
Looting tends to happen in the aftermath of a disaster, so greater warning will be unlikely to make it worse, and will more likely to improve the situation by giving more time to mobilize police and military resources. A warning will also give shop owners more time to get to their shops and exercise their 2nd amendment rights.
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Let's put some plausible out-of-my-ass figures out. Suppose serious asteroid impacts happen about once in fifty million years, which isn't off by an order of magnitude, and that one would cause ten trillion dollars of damage, which is probably reasonable. That means that the expected annual loss of serious asteroid impacts is about $200K, so it makes sense to build something of a warning and defense system, at least a capability that we can implement if we need it.
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"even when there is no apparent value in going as deep as they are" = You think possibly preventing a cataclysmic asteroid impact in the next 50 years has no apparent value?
What is the value of your tautologist's thesis if nothing alive is around to lambaste it? Science is a process, breakthroughs are a result. Policy breaks and is reformed in the wake of it. Governments fall away like old paradigms. Priorities change, societies evolve or go extinct.
Preventing a civilization-ending impact in the remote
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Yes with billions of dollars they're going to figure out how to move the earth a few thousand miles for a day or 3 until "the big one" passes. I think the money would be better off being spent on the legal American public that can't feed their kids tonight.
But we're not spending the money on figuring out how to move the earth now, and we're not spending it on the legal American public that can't feed their kids tonight either. The only conclusion is that there's some other thing which we deem more important than either.
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! Then, when the Earth is unlivable, these billionaires will escape to Mars [time.com].
There is nothing that mankind could conceivably do that would make Earth more unlivable than Mars.
Re:Anthropogenic Asteroid Activity (AAA) (Score:2)
There, there. How much is Elon Musk paying you for spreading doubts [mediamatters.org] and diverting our attention, while he builds his Elysium [imdb.com] over there?
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! Then, when the Earth is unlivable, these billionaires will escape to Mars [time.com].
There is nothing that mankind could conceivably do that would make Earth more unlivable than Mars.
Seriously.
One damn planet in the entire universe, maybe, where you can walk around in your shirt sleeves sometimes and enjoy it, and we treat it as disposable.
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There is one and only one thing I can think of and that is full blown nuclear war.
Even that is unlikely to make Earth unlivable. Modern nukes are relatively clean, and they are smaller and there are many fewer of them than a few decades ago. A full blown nuclear war may kill a billion or so people, and the economic disruption may kill another billion or two, but humanity would almost certainly survive. Mars, on the other hand, has about a 0% chance of supporting even a single human in the foreseeable future without regular resupply missions from Earth.
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Actually, it is. But I doubt that's the reason.
6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of english is that?
Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
compounded by "more than twice as close." Does that mean less than half the distance (my guess) or more than half the distance?
Yes.
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Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
What kind of english is that?
That was my thought too. 1/6 the distance of the moon would make more sense. It's like saying Suzy is twice as skinny as Lucy... it doesn't really make sense even though we know what you mean by it.
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Similarly jarring is "This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet". It seems fairly clear that estimates that are so loose don't have a tenth of a foot precision. Same with 4.6m for the metric.
The figures stated are likely due to idiots converting metric to imperial back and forth multiple times, while not taking into account uncertainties, nor going back to the source.
If I were to guess, it would be that the original said 5-10 m.
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Similarly jarring is "This asteroid is estimated to be between 15-32.8 feet". It seems fairly clear that estimates that are so loose don't have a tenth of a foot precision. Same with 4.6m for the metric. The figures stated are likely due to idiots converting metric to imperial back and forth multiple times, while not taking into account uncertainties, nor going back to the source.
If I were to guess, it would be that the original said 5-10 m.
And of course, 5-10,yards would be a more accurate conversion of the precision implied in the original than converting to feet, even if it was rounded to an integer.
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it doesn't really make sense even though we know what you mean by it.
The purpose of language is to let someone else know what you mean, so it makes perfect sense.
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Whereas that is absolutely true, it makes me think of "Yoda". Yoda get's his meaning across in films, despite talking funny. If you or I went around talking like him, people would assume a few screws were loose. It takes that tiny fraction of a second to interpret "odd but understandable" language. When things are almost right, but not quite right it naturally gets on a lot of people's wick.
There might be a plus side to it though. I remember reading that students learn material better when they have a p
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Whereas that is absolutely true, it makes me think of "Yoda". Yoda get's his meaning across in films, despite talking funny. If you or I went around talking like him, people would assume a few screws were loose. It takes that tiny fraction of a second to interpret "odd but understandable" language. When things are almost right, but not quite right it naturally gets on a lot of people's wick.
There might be a plus side to it though. I remember reading that students learn material better when they have a professor with an odd accent. When it takes more effort to understand what someone is saying, you're more likely to remember what they said.
Perhaps that's why, talk like that, Yoda does.
Fun fact: Yoda is so old that he actually wrote the Little Drummer Boy carol. "Come, they told me, the newborn king to see". Toss in a couple of rumpapumpums and there you have it.
Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
The article is 6 times less better english speaking than above average. One day I go to park went, There see I a man grinding a monkey's organ.
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Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot knows words. They are the best words. It's the best English. It's great. Believe me. Let's make /. great again.
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What's funny is that I can't tell if you're mocking stupidity or North Korea's Dear Leader with that.
You don't watch much TV, do you. The subject of mockery was America's Dear Leader, President Donald Trump. You may know him from such hits as Home Alone 2 and The Apprentice.
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Re:6 times closer than the moon? (Score:4, Funny)
It all depends on how close to the Moon we are these days. I mean, are we still angry at it?
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What kind of english is that?
It's the kind of English that's written by a person who hasn't sharpened their crayon in a while.
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What kind of english is that?
That would be English as she is spoke [wikipedia.org].
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Thank you for that link. My hovercraft is full of eels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Yeah, football fields only please.
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"One time closer" would be hitting the Earth... I dunno what to do with the other five times...
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It means it passed so close it caused temperatures to double.
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What does 67 degrees above absolute zero have to do with km?
It's 67 degrees above a kilometer. I thought everyone knew that.
(50% of the time it works every time!)
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This is more of a math issue than it is a language issue.
Horrifying any one who took middle school algebra.
It's an admission that many Americans have no math skills, don't know what basic fractions are, and saying something like "one-sixth the distance" confuses them terribly.
I've been hearing nonsense like "six times closer" on national and local newscasts in the last year.
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I've Had Enough of This (Score:5, Funny)
This is the third asteroid to buzz by earth closer than the distance to the moon this year.
That's it, I'm heading down to the local planning office at Alpha Centauri and lodging a stern complaint about this new hyperspace bypass.
Re:I've Had Enough of This (Score:4, Funny)
Bring a flashlight. And rope. And beware of the leopard.
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Didn't see that coming (Score:2)
We don't expect a closer pass by one of these visitors until October, when asteroid 2012 TC4 could come more than twice as close.
Well, they didn't expect this one. So I'm guessing they'll spot others whizzing past between now and October.
Twice as close ? (Score:2)
How about at half the distance ? Twice as close. Means as much as twice as cold.
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Giant Asteriod 2016 (Score:2)
Six times closer! Four times less! (Score:2)
*sigh*
argh! (Score:2)
...one sixth the distance to the moon... ...less that half that distance...
I'm almost shaking from just how the phrases "6 times closes to the moon" and "more than half a close" mess with my brain...
Please, for the sake of us people with less than normal minds, don't use phrases like that!
My wish (Score:2)
I'm not kidding when I say I wish it would hit the Earth and wipe us all out. This planet needs a reset.
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I am with you, my friend.
I don't think that the human race deserves to make it out of the gravity well.
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Dunno about your wish but I's sure be happy if it landed on Mr. Cheeto-Head.
So would an increasing majority of Americans I suspect...
Mac
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Dunno about your wish but I's sure be happy if it landed on Mr. Cheeto-Head.
I would settle for that as well.
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If we get hit by a really big one, a year's advance notice won't be enough time to make a significant difference, given that we don't have any actual systems designed and built to do anything about it. We'd just be able to track it on its way in and have parties for a year before our annihilation. Serves us right, too. We've had plenty of warning about these things.
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The solution has been known for a long time; it was published 50 years ago. Time magazine ran an article on the solution; here's a Wired article https://www.wired.com/2012/03/mit-saves-the-world-project-icarus-1967/ [wired.com].
Long story short, we have to be able to launch a number of nuclear-tipped Saturn V missiles starting 90 days before predicted impact.
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I never said the solution wasn't known. There's plenty of feasible ideas of how to handle such a threat. The problem is that none of them are actually possible with our current technical capability. If we knew of a predicted impact tomorrow (that was 90 days away), there's absolutely no way we could make even one Saturn V missile. We'd have a hard time getting one of our existing rockets ready in that time, let alone something we've totally forgotten how to build, or something similar in payload capabil
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I never said the solution wasn't known. There's plenty of feasible ideas of how to handle such a threat. The problem is that none of them are actually possible with our current technical capability. If we knew of a predicted impact tomorrow (that was 90 days away), there's absolutely no way we could make even one Saturn V missile. We'd have a hard time getting one of our existing rockets ready in that time, let alone something we've totally forgotten how to build, or something similar in payload capability. And for "a number", there's just no way. We don't have all that stuff built and ready. It would take quite some time to get a bunch of big-ass rockets built. Then there's the problem with the payloads. Could we even make payloads which would deflect the asteroid? Could we repurpose some existing ICBM warheads for this? Somehow I doubt it's that easy.
For a truly effective asteroid deflection system, we need a system that's actually designed for the purpose, tested by simulation, built, and then run through some actual field testing to make sure the warheads (whatever they are, whether they're nuclear bombs or some kind of thrusters that attach to the asteroid) actually work in space. We don't have any of that. Even if we could throw together something in time from spare parts, it's a crapshoot if it'd actually work and not fail at some stage.
In the movie "Gorath", when a dwarf star is headed on collision course with Earth, we simply install a bunch of large rocket thrusters at the South Pole, move the Earth out of the way, then put it back again. How the same thrusters work in two opposite directions I do not recall.
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If we get hit by a really big one, a year's advance notice won't be enough time to make a significant difference, given that we don't have any actual systems designed and built to do anything about it. We'd just be able to track it on its way in and have parties for a year before our annihilation. Serves us right, too. We've had plenty of warning about these things.
That would involve an increase in the federal budget, so it's a nonstarter.
Would it really make a whizzing sound? (Score:2)
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Scream? no, whiz? yes
Big Truck (Score:2)
"You stole my lyrics" -- Dez Fafara (Coal Chamber)
SMOD is **such** a tease. . . (Score:2)
. . . . .until we stop noticing. . . . .
They can be intercepted (Score:2)
China, US, and the former USSR have already knocked out satellites. From the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01... [nytimes.com]
> China successfully carried out its first test of an antisatellite weapon last week, signaling
> its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of
> concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said yesterday.
>
> Only two nations â" the Soviet Union and the United States â" have previously destroyed
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Guarantee the secret air force space shuttle is designed to capturing enemy and recovery our own satellites. One of their test was staying in orbit right next to an decommissioned satellite.
No boom today. (Score:2)
Boom tomorrow.
Six times closer! Sigh! Absurd. (Score:2)
Not to worry (Score:2)
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The problem with that is there's some fantastic museums there.
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There's little way to make a reasonable estimate, just based on the size alone. You also need to know the delta-V (the actual velocity it'll impact the Earth), the angle of entry into the atmosphere, and the composition of the asteroid. It could burn up (as many already do, we don't even see many), or it could wipe out a city's downtown area.
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There's little way to make a reasonable estimate, just based on the size alone. You also need to know the delta-V (the actual velocity it'll impact the Earth), the angle of entry into the atmosphere, and the composition of the asteroid. It could burn up (as many already do, we don't even see many), or it could wipe out a city's downtown area.
I imagine that it also depends on the physical integrity of the object; is it solid enough to hold together, or does it have internal faults which cause it to break into pieces under the stress of atmospheric entry.
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So it missed us by 5 Earth Diameters. If a car overtakes you and is 5 car lengths to the side of you (73 feet away,) is that creepy? If you're walking along and somebody runs past at 25 feet away, do you think they nearly hit you?
Scale is everything, people. This was rare. Not scary.
Tesla is already updating its self-driving software to detect and avoid these.