Truck-size asteroid makes one of the tightest fly-bys of Earth ever recorded A box-truck-sized asteroid has made one of the closest approaches by a near-Earth object ever recorded, brushing past our home world at a distance of a couple of thousand miles on Thursday. Codenamed 2023 BU, the space rock is estimated to be between 11.5 and 28 feet (3.5 to 8.5 metres) across. Although it's fairly sizable, …
>>>most of the asteroid would burn up in our atmosphere<<<
That's a statement I'd only be happy making when I've seen a mass estimate for this lump. All I've seen so far is the 'size' between 3.5 & 8.5 metres which does give quite a potential range depending on the asteroids composition.
On one hand you hear people making big plans about deflecting or destroying asteroids which might crash into us, on the other hand you see that the average time between discovery and collision/flyby is usually measured in weeks if not days...
Somehow those two don't fit together. If some astronomer manages to detect (despite the cloud of Internet satellites) a killer asteroid coming for us, we won't even have the time to plan a meeting to chose the committee which will oversee the project...
If it helps, US Space Command has plans for a lunar base to monitor for space disasters, as well as some Lagrange point monitoring stations to try and do a better job of finding crap that might hit. Their goal is to have everything within the lunar orbit under observation. If/when this is achieved we should have the ability to control that space and prevent anything from taking a crack at the planet. Ambitious, and probably years if not decades jnto the future though.
And yes, if the US gets control of everything within the lunar orbit, that means control over everything. As a USAian, I have mixed feelings about this. Better us than certain other nations, but not by enough. I'm just glad the most that might happen before I go on that final journey into the great beyond is the beginning of a lunar base.
"US Space Command has plans"
So the fuck what? They'll never get funding for all that ... but I'm absolutely certain they'll waste as many of my tax dollars on the boondoggle as they possibly can.
Yes, I vote. And talk with my elected officials about how and why I vote. Do you?
OK it's called Fin del Mundo, so most of the Mundo doesn't care, and usually nor would I.
But I just happen to be there at the moment.
But could I find anything anywhere in either English or Spanish telling me where over the "southern tip of South America" it would pass, so that I could look out for it or the crash?
Standing at the southern tip, I think the direction would have been "Up"... :-)
More seriously, there was a lovely pizza spot in Ushuaia when I visited, but that was 18 years ago. East of the town, not far from the airport, if I remember correctly. Some of the pizza toppings were, er, different, but they tasted really good, and made a nice change from big slabs of meat, which seemed to be the usual food available in restaurants in Argentina.
A few missed headline opportunties there - "Asteroid approaches the end of the world" would have pulled in a few more eyeballs (sadly even in the Argentinian press it wasn't reported like that)
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