Astronomy crowd spots PLANET KILLER! Unravelling DNA, identifying exoplanets, and now, spotting near-Earth asteroids: is there anything that science can’t outsource to an Internet crowd? The European Space Agency has announced that its Space Situational Awareness program, in which amateur astronomers pitch into to help analyze sky survey photographs, has turned …
only around the size of your average bus, hardly enough to do more than flatten a few suburbs at best, since all the bigger stuff has pretty much been found and tracked by now!
If anything's going to take out the Earth in the near future, it'll be a comet kicked in from the Kuitper disc by Jupiter, there's not much left that's closer that we don't already know about. - Aside from Geographos and Apophis, none of it poses a threat, and even they are long shots to actually hit us.
I don't know why, but I sometimes wish that a reasonably sized asteroid does crash into earth and cause a bit of destruction and loss of life. Because the way politicians usually react to single big events is to make laws and make it out that they are doing something to stop this event (which is usually a single occurence anyway) from ever happening again. They will then ramp up the space programme into sending Bruce Willis out into space to stop the next asteroid, in the mean time we might get people travelling to Mars and the asteroids and doing some really exciting space research.
Am I a bad person for thinking this?
...and since every 6 year old knows that the moon is "about 400Mm" away (in other words 0.4Gm of course), then hearing about this chunk of rock being 30Gm out at closest approach is perfectly understandable.
What the %$£$ all those numbers are in miles is anyone's guess. Or brontosauruses. Or linguini. As the parent poster pointed out, this is the UK, and no sensible person would have taught their children about *any* of those units.
The announcement claims 0.1879 AU, which as we all know is 200781713603.78571428571428571429 linguine.
About.
However, a perusal of the official ElReg style guide turns up:
>For greater than 1lg, the following should be used:
>Double-decker bus = 65.85lg
>Brontosaurus = 15 double-decker buses laid bumper-to-bumper
Which means the closest approach to the Earth should correctly be stated as 194414634.32949476086730988691773 brontosauruses laid nose-to-tail.
About.
Incidentally, it's curious the the London bus should measure precisely one fifteenth of a brontosaurus. I wonder whether this is by design. And if so, the design of the bus or the design of the brontosaurus?
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