We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth An asteroid bigger than the size of three football fields is hurtling towards Earth – and will pass so close to our planet, it'll be visible to the naked eye and may pass through the band of human satellites in geostationary orbit. Before you all panic and start hoarding food, guns, and Mad Max-style clothing, it should be …
'Calm down' my arse. You're going to glory in the publicity as much as you can, you lying, fearmongering shitstain. Some of your brainless flock -- especially those new converts you're after -- will sell their houses and all they own before the day of doom and others will kill themselves or their children to be spared the horror. Fucking exploitative arsehole.
Religion poisons everything.
So what's wrong with punch cards? If you make a mistake, you can stick it in a different slot of the card reader, and have the reader copy the old card onto a new card, up to the column where you made a mistake. At least I could on the machine I learned programming on, back in 1969. Copy-punch, we called it.
And there you go falling for the people stirring the pot. Brilliant way to prove your not as stupid as them, by getting riled up into the fight.
You do know the only ones benefiting from the fight are those selling the weapons? Yet think it right to fight the "other side" while the bigwigs sit there laughing at how gullible people are to get involved i the arguments?
If you truly are less poisonous than religion, prove it by being helpful, not harmful!
Calm down. If Bruce Willis can't save us (where's our armor plated Space Shuttle?) then there's a couple of things to think about. The first is that the earth will be a bit less populated. Second, his target is audience isn't the most intelligent. So unless that preacher runs for President, what's the worst that can happen?
Nicely trolled though you missed the icon. Have a beer and maybe a valium for effort.
Many, many times my phone has insisted that the weather I should be experiencing is sunny rather than the sodden actuality of real life.
If we don't get a direct hit, can I at least pray for a few satellites to be taken out? Being the sort of chap who revels in the misfortunes of others I would get much glee from planes dropping out of the sky and deliveries winding up in Wokingham due to GPS failure. It the Internet were badly affected, that would be a bonus too.
Icon: because that's my state of mind, that is.
Just yesterday, totally unrelatedly, I came across the sentence """Due to exaggerated press coverage of Level 1 asteroids, a rewording of the Torino Scale was published in 2005, adding more details and renaming the categories: in particular, Level 1 was changed from "Events meriting careful monitoring" to "Normal". """
IN MICE!
You would be amazed at how many girls love a LandRover with the top down.
LandRovers are for people who do things, Porsche and Ferraris are for those who need a substitute for .....stuff.
Being a LandRover driver I could provide valid reasons and purposes for the alternative use of knicker elastic.
Exhaust hangers
SU carb throttle return springs
Alternator/dynamo belts
I've only driven a landy once, it was terrifying, like a two tonne skateboard on black ice - although off road they are impressive. Someone in the village has a lightweight v8 one - goes like a scalded cat with a JATO pack rammed up it's arse, but has VW Thing style seats and goes airborne at practically every bump.. Would give health & safety people fits.
I own a Wolseley landcrab.. Wonderful idea BMC putting the fuel line right down the centre of the car, millimetres away from that exhaust pipe thingy. Nice to drive - even nicer now I've finally managed to unbodge the garage bodge of putting wrong plugs in (5/6 instead of 9s) and then richening the mixture to hide the bad work..
Mines a 1971 - with a few special modifications. As far as know there are 8 Wolseley 18/85 II from that year still on the road. That's it.
Fun fact. The Wolseley has the engine from the MGB and you can get a supercharger kit for the MGB.. Yes, it's been done. A 130hp Morris 1800 in Australia. They also did a 4.4 flat plane v8 prototype with longitudinal engine and transverse automatic - apparently it was great, until you came to a corner..
Nice car to drive but too many suicidal idiots these days... For the 15th time teenage girl... I am NOT driving a bloody MINI - I don't have ABS and crumple zones happen to other people..
I have driven a landy a lot more than once. I didn't find it terrifying, possibly because I never went fast enough. I seemed to spend all my time lubricating things, tightening things and replacing things, so it was good training for later. But then cars got reliable and it all became a bit academic.
I do want the new Jimny though. The design seems to be a small version of what the Land Rover should have become, not the current generation of electronics housings for Chinese millionaires.
I've also driven a Landy - in fact many Landies - over many years, and rather than finding them terrifying, they always gave me a certain feeling of invincibility (may not be a good thing).
Once when a eurobox decided to pull out in front of me on a fast A road, the only result on the Landy was a bent front bumper, which I unbolted and hit very hard with a big hammer until it was straight again, the eurobox, conversely, was a total write-off.
I was once minding my own business at traffic lights in Taunton, where I had stopped a bit back from the line (trucks sometimes cut the corner.) A taxi driver in the next lane decided to get in front of me. He misjudged it.
Large crease down the side of the taxi for him. 5 minutes with Nitromors getting the paint of the edge of the bumper for me.
However, in the reverse situation last summer the driver of a seven and a half tonner decided to hit my rear bumper while I was parked. Doubtless a 5 minute paint removal job for him. A £2000 recovered insurance bill for his boss. It helps to be on the right side of the case when driving these things.
It isn't fibreboard but, IIRC, Tufnol. Tufnol is formaldehyde urea impregnated cloth. Tufnol correctly specified and designed actually makes pretty good low power gears for things such as contact breakers. It's the correctly specified and designed bit that tends to fall down. Doesn't it, Velocette? Fortunately I was only doing 85 when the thing decided to turn to shreds, and Velocettes actually had an oil filter.
The Japanese thought they would do better and sometimes used nylon for the oil pump gear on two strokes. After seeing what the failure of one of these could do to a 750 Kawa I got a bit obsessive about checking mine regularly.
Big problem - the Wales is pretty clearly defined in terms of area, subject to minor differences between high and low tide. Although this may change when we ciaim 'Herefordshire' after indy.
But the Rugby Union pitch is a variable unit. In the outmoded non-Reg units used by the real world, the Rugby Union pitch (n.b. not 'field') can be 68-70m wide by 94-100m long, so a 9.5% variation is permissible.
I think stick to the micro-Wales, clearly defined as 20779 sq.m. or about 3 rugby pitches.
Clearly, we need a new ER (El Reg) unit. Commentards, to arms! Swimming pools are too ... swimmy. London buses are lengths, etc.
The current list of units doesn't seem complete: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
In honour of our illustrious forebears, and those who were previously our Overlords, cruelly cut down by the very thing we are trying to measure, may I humbly suggest a Dippy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dippy_(London)
I thought the default unit of volume was Bulgarian "safety equipment", though it appears that volume is based on grapefruit and weight is more related to the former unit. Though shouldn't that be mass rather than weight, and what % of the MVS(v) is this thing travelling at anyway?
More teeth with cavities into which they can insert tracking devices smaller than a grain of rice, and receivers that can transmit subliminal signals into the jawbone.
Yeah. True.
's why I've smashed all my own teeth out wiv a 'ammer, innit? Dentists are in the employ of the gubermint and the NSA and the CIA and GCHQ and all them.
Dentists are in the employ of the gubermint and the NSA and the CIA and GCHQ and all them.
You've got this totally wrong! You've fallen for the Dentists' propoganda you foolish sheeple!1!1!
The CIA, GCHQ, the NSA, the New World Order, the Illuminati and Justin Bieber are all employees of the International Dentists Conspiracy!
This was obviously why the Japanese were testing their Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator last week...
I am not an astrodynamist. However I believe the current thinking is that tidally disrupted objects gradually spread out along the approximate line of the original object's orbit. This is how asteroids and comets give rise to meteor showers. See also Shoemaker-Levy impact at Jupiter.
Don't take it on the plane, you can almost guarantee it'll get ruined by the Samsonite gorillas in the luggage processing areas.
Instead do yourself a favor & ship it via a courier service. You can pack it with plenty of foam padding, insure it, & mail it to said relatives with a signature required. The courier service will be INFINITELY more careful with your stuff than any airline.
Bonus of this is that the airline can't send it to some other part of the world due to a fat fingered routing error, can't charge you extra for wanting to take it with you, can't have fun of throwing it around like a drunk monkey on crack, and can't "lose it" to one of those gorillas with sticky fingers.
If you follow the link in the article there is a lovely animation of the flyby. The good news is that the ISS will still be around in 2029 if you believe the animation. Bad news is you don't really get a sense of where the best place to see the thing is. Can't find any useful maps online that I trust. It looks as if closest approach will be somewhere over mid-Atlantic, so I'm guessing you'd get a better view from UK than RSA, assuming you can find decent dark skies here (and no clouds!)
If it's not that dangerous, then why give it the name Aphophis?
"Apep (Aapep, Apepi or Apophis) was the ancient Egyptian spirit of evil, darkness and destruction. As the arch enemy of the sun god, Ra, he was a malevolent force who could never be entirely be vanquished. Every night as the sun travelled though the underworld (or across the sky) his roar would fill the air and he would launch his attack."
You may relax in 2029 but ... it’s not done. There’s a little piece of obscure orbital mathematics called the “mirror theorem” which means the same scenario will repeat in reverse some years beyond the 2029 approach, at that date plus some multiple of the orbital periods. And the near misses will repeat until it’s whammo !
As one who watched the impact of Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter, there’s little doubt about there being an extinction event some time in the not so distant future.
If it's a theorem presumably the scientific community currently lack real-world observations to justify it being a law? As such, though I'll rather miss the place, at least I'll be consoled by my fiery death evidencing said theorem. And anyway I'll be getting on a bit post-2029.
There's a good chance the encounter with earth will be so close the thing is getting flung well out of it's current orbit (And possibly out of the solar system). I doubt it's going to make a close encounter again any time soon with the gravity assist it's going to receive.
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"Apophis is travelling at breakneck speeds, and will cross the second largest ocean in a single hour."
Pah!, not very fast at all really. Britain built a plane that regularly crossed that ocean in three hours while serving champagne to overpaid celebrities, politicians and business executives.
Bruce Willis might not be young enough to plant a nuclear bomb if we need to break the asteroid up and have the pieces go round Earth.
But maybe that doesn't matter. With modern plastic surgery, we can at least make him pretty enough to give the alien weapon/girl a good smooching, and persuade her to use the stones in that temple in Egypt to stop the asteroid in its tracks.
I have the inkling that there's a new internet law occurring...
As the length of a comments section increases the probability that someone states that the problem/issue is due to or can be fixed by Brexit tends to 1.
In deference to my favourite author I propose it is termed the PTerry Law.
One: the warning of avalanches appears to mean avalanches ON APOPHIS. Anyone there reading this web site, get ready. That goes for "changing axis of rotation", too.
Two: "human satellites". That doesn't sound good actually. Are you predicting that the UK space industry WILL get going but will be mainly to expel illegal immigrants, upwards?
666 42 Apocalypse???
I don't have to worry about global warming anymore! We have efficiently compressed it into a single short event.
And in an attempt to get this back to IT time to dust of that Business Continuity Plan - the probability of big humongous planetary fuck event just went up. Buy shares in that new Mars cloud computing service....
Rosetta and Hayabusa missions added to the costs the fact that they had to carry a lot of heavy equipment for large distances. The weight taken by the fuel forced the planners to slim down the instruments. This is a huge opportunity to land sizable robots with adequate solar panels and a lot of instruments on an asteroid.
It's velocity that matters, much more than distance. If you want to land on this thing, you've got to match velocities with it. Which means carrying all that fuel and engine mass anyway.
Most of the probes we send out get up to speed in a relatively short burn to achieve Earth escape velocity, plus a bit - then coast for a few years to get to their target with most of their instruments turned off. In the case of a nearby object you don't need the coast phase, but you still need the velocity.
Well I suppose it does depend on your definition of "landing". How soft do you want your probe's impact to be? Instrument-survivable, or will 50,000kph do?
What about using the earth as a slingshot?
Won't work as it will start way too close to earth. A lunar slingshot might work and if everything works out with the position of the moon at that time, the probe could pick up some more speed with an earth slingshot when coming back from the moon, but I'll leave the calculations for the (in)possibility of that to the specialists.
Yes, I can see it going soooo well:
"You know, that asteroid that flew by and totally missed the Earth? Well, we decided to have a bit of fun and change its trajectory, but we've had kind of a mishap. Now it's hurtling back straight at us... But we've learnt so much from this cockup, you just wouldn't believe!"
Jim Bridenstine said we should expect some sort of hit in our lifetimes....
Kind of vague since there are plenty of really old people around.
But no fear - an insightful comment on Slashdot mentioned that if it's really a big hit, it's guaranteed to come right at the end of your life anyway.
No coat, it's Springtime now.
On a scale from the shrew to the blue whale, I wouldn't put humans among the largest mammals. Average, at best.
The correct way to do it, is to line up all species of mammals and take the median. Everything larger than a small fox belongs to the large mammals/animals which will go extinct with the next huge impact.
If your point is that, as large mammals, humans would be wiped out by a Chicxulub-like collision, I'm not convinced. Humans are currently spread all around the globe, able to withstand a large range of temperatures and inhospitable conditions and generally quite adaptable. Even if 95% of the human race was destroyed, I'm pretty sure you'd see societies rebuilt within a few decades.
Like with the "predictions" surrounding the recent US eclipse it wont be long before some nutter claims that this
is a doomsday rock predicted in some holy book. They will post a video to youtube that will be pasted aroudneverywhere and
they will then sell you all the stuff you need to protect yourself from shelters to guns and some magical tablet that gives you
immunity to all known pathogens.
10 years is also plenty of time for any number of cults to set themselves up for a mass suicide believing that this is acutally
the incoming alien spaceship they have been expecting to carry themselves away.
I've put the date in my calendar. Hopefully when I wake up the next day I discover that the calculations were not incorrect and we are still here,
eating breakfast while watching all the crazy stuff about the dead cult members on the news.
"WE REGRET ..."
Which in 2-words, alone, goes to show that 'El-Reg' , another hint, has turned to, or has always been an anti-human, aka pro tech-head, NIHILIST platform.
I don't much care for 'El-reg's turn of attitude, as reflected recently in language.
And your best-case scenario, as your readers wither away, is to be found in the advice:
"When you cynically become that which you are parodying, you're in trouble."
Hey! Look! I'm in your face. I studied Math, Physics, Computer-science
I work in Electronics, DC- thru microwaves, to this day. Every-day.
I studied a software-dev degree at age of 49 or so, in 2004/5. I have learned to not only stand-up for myself but also for my species. Well enough said. You may all be just sitting there playing with yourselves and your consoles; - 'having a laugh'.
Go push a button!
How d'ya like them apples!?
I don't think so. amanfrommars kind-of makes sense but in such convoluted language and with such strange analogies that he reminds me of Finnegans Wake.
This one seems just to be an American Exceptionalist who needs to tell us how many degrees he has. Personally, like Prince Charles, I thought three was quite enough.
It was first discovered in 2004 by a team of astronomers working at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, United States.
They only managed to observe it for two days, however, due to technical problems and poor weather conditions. The faraway visitor remained lost to astronomers until another group at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, caught a glimpse of it.
This time they were able to piece together its trajectory.
How do they know that these two were the same lump of rock, given they couldn't work out it's trajectory until they saw it the second time?
(We really need a "?" icon for when you're actually asking a question.)
How do they know that these two were the same lump of rock, given they couldn't work out it's trajectory until they saw it the second time?
Once the trajectory was known, it become possible to calculate it backwards as well and found it coincided with the previous observation.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-An-inverted-cumulative-distribution-curve-showing-the-mean-time-between-impacts-from_fig16_222658791
Millions of years between anything significant, supposedly.
But I'd still like to recommend a nice lunch on Tuesdays, as well as on Fridays. You know, just in case...
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