Bad news. Asteroid 1999 KW4 flew by, did not hit Earth killing us all. Good news: Another one, Didymos, is on the way A pair of asteroids just whizzed past Earth at 70,000 KPH (43,496 MPH), and although the flyby presented no danger to our home world, we can learn from the close encounter to potentially thwart any future menaces from the cosmos. The ground-based European Southern Observatory (ESO) was used to clock the asteroid duo, dubbed …
Perhaps it would make more sense to say "5.2M kilometres"
Yes...to my mind "M" means mega and "m" means milli. 5.2 milli-kilometres would be 5.2 metres. Eek!
(Although I also missed the "m" on first reading, and was trying to work out 5.2 kilometres using a familar frame of reference. I must have been subconsciously channeling Douglas Adams, as I was trying imagine space-related distances with in comparison to how far it is from my house to the shops.
To be pedantic...
It would be typeset as: 5.2⋅109 m
or: 5.2 Gm
Note the non-breaking space before the unit/prefix-unit, as per SI specification (see f.ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix for details). Also, combining several prefix, which was quite often done in the old days, is "not compatible with the SI".
A missed opportunity to communicate it as 5.2 billion meters.
If a major catastrophe is not the time to throw around the word 'billion', when is?
Except we would then have the issue of US vs UK definitions of billion. But this controversy would lead to more comment posts which could be a good thing.
Didn't see that damned 'm' either and I was thinking, shit 5.2 Km is awfully close for something that big..
I wonder what kind of correction of angle would it take for one of those things to actually hit us. Obviously you would have to know a fair bit about it's flight path, origin, mass etc I know that 5.2(Million) Kms is pretty far away but in space terms it's actually not for at all. Especially when you consider that the Sun is only 150(Million) Kms away from the Earth..
Not for a few more decades but when the orbital predictions get ultra reliable and the capability of gently steering such rocks has become routine, maybe we could simply eliminate such rocks by re-directing them into collision with the moon. A long way off admittedly.
Not for a few more decades but when the orbital predictions get ultra reliable and the capability of gently steering such rocks has become routine, maybe we could simply eliminate such rocks by re-directing them into collision with the moon. A long way off admittedly.
By that time we could (hopefully) have some lunar base so crashing stuff into the Moon could not be so sound (pun intended).
Guess again. Currently Apophis seems to be predicted to pass closer than one-tenth of that to Earth in 2029, at 31000 Km - no millions there.
“In the worst possible case, this knowledge is also essential to predict how an asteroid could interact with the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, allowing us to mitigate damage in the event of a collision.”
This one was 1.3km long. How the feck do you 'mitigate' the damage of something that size? Move to Mars?
I just used Imperial College London's impactor page to estimate a hit by this thing on London. https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/cgi-bin/impact.cgi?latitude=&longitude=&LocationSelect=1&CraterSelect=0&diam=1.3&diameterUnits=2&pdiameter_select=0&pdens=&pdens_select=3000&vel=&velocityUnits=1&velocity_select=17&theta=&angle_select=45&wdepth=&wdepthUnits=1&tdens=2500
It made a mess. There would be an 18 km diameter, 700 metre deep, crater where London once was. There'd be secondary weather and climate effects, felt for several years. For speculation about possible long-term effects of a big impact, see among others S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. (Warning: Mr Stirling ain't called 'Buckets of Blood' Stirling for nothing...) See also Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Fav scene: the surfer dude riding the tsunami into Century City. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein, had a lot more much smaller impactors. They did manage to remove Cheyenne Mountain, though...
You can mitigate the damage by: Move out of the impact zone, as anything there is dead. If the impact is in the ocean, move to high ground to avoid tidal waves. If needed stockpile enough food and/or food-growing equipment to last until any damage to the atmosphere has fixed itself. If needed ensure you have sufficient defences to protect your refuge from other less well-prepared people.
Back in 1979, a friend and I started playing a doubles game of (arcade) Asteroids at about 5:30pm on a Saturday evening.
We were still playing the same game when they had to turn the machine off at midnight because the place was closing. Lucky for the owners that there were 3 Asteroids machines side by side or they might have asked us to leave.
We lost count of how many times we 'clocked' the score over - it went back to 0 at 100,000.
We also became quite skilled at keeping games of Missile Command and Joust going for hours as well over the next few years. Never quite got the hang of Defender unfortunately although a few of my friends did.
Those were the days... I still try to relive them on the MAME emulator from time to time. I can keep Missile Command and Joust running for a fair while after a bit of practice.
Ah! You brought back memories of my childhood/early teenage years. Thank you!
The dark arcade on Saturday morning. 50p pocket money. Chewing gum making the floor sticky. Older kids smoking whilst playing Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Centipede, etc. The rapid clink of notes being changed into coins. The gutsy thrum of Defender as I Press P1 To Start...
Sounds like a variant of an ion drive, unless the electric propulsion is like a rail gun and accelerates propellant out the back at high speed. The essence of Rocket Science is 'throw stuff out the back, the faster and hotter the better'.
I'm a Biologist so this level of understanding suits me. Except it means your arse after a vindaloo will need permission to fart.
I think that's more or less what it is. AFAICS the advantage must be that any particle slung out is propelled by harvested energy which isn't limited to the energy the same particle can acquire from any chemical reaction it was recently involved in. If the surface of the asterois is sufficiently soft and fluffy I suppose the process could be used to eat the asteroid itself as propellant. That could proceed until it's moved out of range or becomes too small to bother about, whichever happens first.
Or just paint it.
Really need to do the maths. I don't think there would be much difference in power but painting it would give constant output from a solar perspective.
If you don't do the maths before coming up eith these ideas... you end up peeing into the wind.
“In the worst possible case, this knowledge is also essential to predict how an asteroid could interact with the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, allowing us to mitigate damage in the event of a collision.”
This is rather optimistic!
Pick your worst possible case:
We don't see it coming.
We see it coming, five minutes before it hits.
We spot it and are able to predict its interaction with the atmosphere and Earth's surface; it will look like the Vredefort crater.
We spot it coming, the Photino Birds launched it.
Whilst nuking it in space while its still a long way away would be ideal, i wonder what the effect of detonating a nuke in front of it as it enters the atmosphere would be?
Obviously the timing would have to be exact as it'd be moving fast, but it would slow down a lot once it hits the atmosphere. Could launch a string of nukes at it, with a small distance and delay between them.
Isaac Newton says it won't work.
Detonating a nuclear bomb in front of an asteroid will have very little effect because the kinetic energy of a civilisation-destroying asteroid is enormous compared even to the tsar bomba. It just means you'll get nuclear fallout as well as impact.
If the bomb is not in contact with the asteroid when it goes off, the effect would be less still.
Even with equal power in the nukes... Newton says you lose. You just end up heating the rock! Now you have a slighly slower, much hotter (possibly plasma) and a little more widespread target.
Granted the survival rate of a supersonic bullet the size of an anvil vs said anvil turned into napalm no doubt vary. But I think when we get up to astronomical scales we need to think clearly.
You can nudge it, the same way you do with giant ocean liners. But you need lots of time before hand!
Assuming, of course, humanity makes it to the 22nd century and there's anyone around who gives a crap.
Magic 8ball says: chances not so good
https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html
(Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just pointing out this assertion has been made... by "The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne", who evidently have also hit upon a breakthrough in getting coverage, too. Perhaps some IT vendors could commission them to get more coverage of the latest breakthroughs in network attached storage arrays?
They "whized" (no sound in space) "past" Earth ith the speed of 72,000 kph at a distance of 5,200,000 km. That mans that if they miraculously changed their diction ny 90 degrees to fly directly towards the Earth, they still would need 3 full days days to reach us. Not very impressive for "wheezing by".
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