Obviously...
...it was Beagle 2.
Jupiter takes a serious knock
Astronomers using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have captured the aftermath of an object slamming into Jupiter - material thrown up into the atmosphere by the impact and posing for the camera in the infrared: Keck II infred image of the impact site. Pic: Paul Kalas (UCB), Michael Fitzgerald (LLNL/UCB), Franck Marchis (SETI …
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 11:58 GMT Sergie Kaponitovicz
That's big
Using Photoshop, and layering a cut & paste of the brightest part of the impact area over the scaled image of earth, it covers more than half of the continental USA.
It's a very crude way of getting a feel for the explosion, but there is no escaping the fact it really was a serious knock.
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 11:58 GMT Colin 4
Planetary Defense
That bright spot looks pretty bloody big compared to little 'ol Earth ....
A timely reminder that we need to address the issue of planetary defense from space impacts. Sooner or later, we are gonna get hit. It's the one natural disaster we can prevent, and its the most deadly one there is too.
We need to get our arses into gear and find all the objects we can. The earlier we spot 'em, the easier they are to deflect.
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:11 GMT Jason Hall
Leave
"A timely reminder that we need to address the issue of planetary defense from space impacts. Sooner or later, we are gonna get hit. It's the one natural disaster we can prevent, and its the most deadly one there is too."
What he said... although not all of them are going to be easy/possible at all to deflect.
We need to get our assess off this dustball and spread our (world's) dna onto other worlds.
It's the only way to be remotely certain we have any legacy at all.
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:21 GMT Colin Morris
@Colin 4
<quote>A timely reminder that we need to address the issue of planetary defense from space impacts. </quote>
As far as the authorities are concerned we do have a 'planetary defence system'. It's called ..er.. Jupiter!
Jupiter is probably the only reason why allegedly intelligent life evolved on the earth in the first place. History, of course reveals that even Jupiter couldn't save animals such as the dinosaurs. Only a matter of time, then.......
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:32 GMT Jet Set Willy
@Planetry defence types
I'm pretty sure that Jupiter's gravity may have something to do with why it gets hit by stuff fairly often. I think I read something like "The solar system can be considered to contain the Sun, Jupiter and miscellaneous space debris" somewhere.
Having said that I'm also pretty sure I read that we are due a big strike any day now (in geologic terms) and there's pretty much nothing we could do abount it but kiss our backsides goodbye.
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Tuesday 21st July 2009 15:45 GMT Nic Brough 1
Good
My understanding is that Jupiter is responsible for hoovering up loads of objects that would pose a serious threat to whatever ecospheres the other planets in our system have.
Because of Jupiter, it's quite likely that we will last long enough to wipe ourselves out by destroying the Earth's biosphere instead of being twonked by a rock.
Remind me, where did I leave that copy of Fallout? ;-)
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 01:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Space Defense
Yes, I definitely agree that if that hit the Earth we'd be history.. and sure, it would be awesome to step up the effort to protect ourselves from Armageddon. Just one little problem. No one noticed until after it hit the planet, so if it was a rogue comet or whatever, it would have been en route for years and it's path was close enough to ourselves to be scary for most of them.
No.. one.. noticed.. Not exactly comforting given the amount of scare mongering the people that claim to be watching the skies have whipped up in the media. Sounds like someone was playing World of Warcraft on the computer they were supposed to be using to look out for big, fucking asteroids heading our way. However I think I prefer that over crossing their fingers for a very long time because they knew there was absolutely fuck all we'd be able to do about something that big if it was heading to us instead of Jupiter.
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 08:40 GMT Pete 8
When
God made the universe etc, he had some crap left over after cleaning the benches down, so he just lobbed the extra handful at ol' Jupe.
It is all a question of Faith.
However, DARPA should still mass-produce some Bruce Willis clones for interceptor missions.
I vote we use stealth-technology coatings on one side of the earth, so that the asteroid/heammaroid/comet cant see us, and try to crash elsewhere.
Mines the one with no traces of rock from Uranus in the pocket.
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 09:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Didn't anyone else see it on tuesday morning?
In the early hours of Tuesday morning around 1-4am I was watching jupiter thinking it was a UFO, the thing was insanely bright to the point where me and my mate who were watching it conclude, that if there had been something that bright in the sky, we'd probably have noticed it at some point in the last twenty odd years...
Eventually we fired up stellarium and figured out it was jupiter, at that time the top theories we had were the ISS or aliens... We hoped it was aliens, we hoped so very very much!
I imagine this could have been the impact itself if the earliest photo's come the following day, it wouldn't surprise me.
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 12:08 GMT lorenzo
Message from Mongo
Ming the Merciless has despatched war rocket Ajax to bring back the most famous Earhling
Unfortunately due to difficulties with the conversion of metric and imperial measurements, Ajax has made an unscheduled stop on Jupiter
Can you kindly strap Miss Hilton to a saturn 5 rocket and send her heavenwards
Paris -Cos she knows a thing or two about cosmic experiences
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 12:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
UFOs
I have been reliably informed by high level contacts in the Mozilla Foundation that unlike Jupiter, we earthlings are safely cocooned in the embrace of the Firefox defence system which when used with the Noscript sub-system renders us invulnerable to attacks and collisions with unidentified flying objects.
My mum says this is just marketing hype and it's time that I grew up.
A_man_from_earth, aged 35.
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 12:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Where's Jeff Wayne when you need him...
"No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, *they* observed and studied, the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us".
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Wednesday 22nd July 2009 12:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
It was amanfromMars
The culprIT was obviously amanfromMars, displaying his suzerainty over the solar Systems Design by penetration testing of the Jovian Cloud Object. With the motherboard of all waterboard attacks stirring not shaking the Giant Screwdriver, he has planted an illogic bomb on the father of Ares. His conspiracy seeks to lure Ares away from the Roman Ares, a Denial of Service to protect his base station. He hopes that we shall follow the Column of Smoke to a Firewall and a false destination.
Damn, this is harder than it looks....
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Thursday 30th July 2009 09:21 GMT Loki 1
Vogons?
"As to what exactly might have crashed into Jupiter, Orton admitted to New Scientist he didn't have a clue"
Vogon battlecruiser coming to make the interstellar bypass. Unfortunately the helmsman was subjected to some Vogon poetry on the way in system and threw himself out of the airlock near jupiter.
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Monday 3rd August 2009 21:33 GMT Doug Glass
@Anonymous Coward
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
"The War of the Worlds (1898) is an early science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines, equipped with advanced weaponry. It is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth."
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
