
They should have called it the Torino Impact Threat Scale.
Astronomers reckon a 220-million-kilogram asteroid is going to swing by Earth in 2032 with a 1-in-100 chance of hitting us. On Christmas Day, a NASA-operated robot telescope was taking in the night sky in Chile when it caught sight of an object that activated the space agency's Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System. This …
Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System. If you shoehorn those acronyms any harder there is going to be permanent damage.
Anyway, I'll re-read Lucifer's Hamner to see what should be done. Hiding out in the Sierra mountains IIRC and a gun to fend off canibals. But they are on the other side of the earth from where I am. No way I can get there unless I surf the tsunami over the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and up the west coast of America.
Well that is a new measuring unit for the reg standards bureau.
it used to be linguine with options to convert to
Double-decker bus
Brontosaurus
Devon fatberg
Osman
Giraffe
El reg need to update the standards converter https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
If we just stuck with one set of units people would become familiar with them and there would be no need invent a new unit for each measurement. As a bonus numbers from different sources would become easy to compare. To set the record straight: 2024 YR4 is currently moving away from Earth at 104.1 million furlongs per fortnight.
I think we all know that FPF (furlongs per fortnight) has been discredited. I prefer to measure speed in how many average blue whales lengths you travel per hour. The most average blue whale I know is named Miles, so my system is called Miles per Hour (MPH). So the asteroid is travelling at 2,270,400 MPH. Nothing could be simpler.
Speed at impact would be 17.2 km/s. While much remains uncertain (whether it will hit at all, if so where along a long "impact corridor" running from Colombia to the India/China border), conservation of energy makes it fairly easy to determine what the speed would be.
Energy is less easy to determine. We don't know how big it is; it's more like maybe 400 to 800 cans of spam, and the density is something of a guess. At the low end, we're talking Tunguska. At the high end, maybe ten times that?
I don't know the speed of an African swallow (AUUUGGHH!), but if you do, divide it into 17.2 km/s and you'll have your answer. (Rough estimate : barn swallows in my part of the world -- not Africa -- are pretty fast birds and can keep up with a slowish car going about 40 km/hr. 2024 YR4 would be about 1550 times faster. A laden swallow is presumably slower.)
(Incidentally, the close match to the speed at which the asteroid is receding in the article is coincidence. The speed varies with time, and it's actually accelerating away from us at the moment. It'll go through further changes, but would eventually be 17.2 km/s were it to impact us.)
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> "220K Metric Ton. I would have expected more than 'only' 8Mton blast"
Also, bit late here, but IIRC "megaton" is judged by equivalence with an explosion caused by that many tonnes of TNT.
The asteroid isn't made of TNT, and isn't in itself explosive. The mechanism by which it will cause an explosion- by slamming into earth at high speed- is completely different, so they're not comparable in any meaningful way.
>as wide as 886 standard four-inch cans of spam laid end to end
This opens up the option for a measurement of length, the pork-parsec; the distance at which a 4" can of spam subtends an angle of 1 arcsecond. It works out at about 13miles, which is curious because an astronomical parsec is about 2x10^13 miles.
That means that an astronomical parsec is (if I put on my South African accent for a moment) 2 times tin to the power pork-parsec miles. I find that worryingly coincidental.
And a very big bow.
According to planetary.org, the visit will be Dec. 22, 2032.[1]
Best to make a note to decorate the tree a few days early that year, just in case.
[1] good thing it isn't a Torino 10 or we'd all feel proper fools worrying about the end of the 32-bit epoch.
Meaning of course that it was hurtling towards the earth at 17320 m/s just before it took the bypass.
½mv2 means that each 340g can of SPAM packs about 51 MJ a bit more than its nutritional 4.4kJ (1047kcal.) 695 million tins† would pack 35.4PJ (35443TJ) which as the writer stated is about 8 megatons.
Given the Earth hurtles along at 30km/s have be grateful it's not a head on in the offing (I assume asteroid is actually clocking 30+17.3 km/s.)
By 2032 the current adminstration will have stuffed up NASA along with everything else so it's likely we won't see it coming.
I noticed that the favoured impact sites don't include mainland US - manifest destiny I suppose.
† that's 236000 tonnes of pig meat or perhaps 800000 pigs - a bit of a bugger if they were to land in the Middle East, I imagine.
(I assume asteroid is actually clocking 30+17.3 km/s.)
The relative speed between us keeps changing. It was moving away from us at 17.32 km/s on 2025 Jan 27 at 13:00 UTC. Right now (call it 18:00 UTC on Jan 31), we're looking at 18.20 km/s.
On impact in December 2032, its speed (as described below) is quite well-determined, even if we don't know where (or even if) it'll impact. If it does, it will (through sheer coincidence) do so at about 17.2 km/s. It'll initially be a bit slower than that, but will pick up speed over the last hour or so as the earth pulls it in.
Collision will never be at less than about 11 km/s (earth escape speed). That'd be for an object basically in our orbit around the sun, only gaining energy because it's falling into the earth's gravity well.
Head-on collisions could be at up to about 70 km/s. That would be a retrograde object on a parabolic orbit (us going ~30 km/s one way and it going ~40 km/s the other way). There are some comets that come close to doing that, but for most objects, we're looking at something much closer to that 17.2 km/s level of havoc.
Interstellar object could, of course, be much faster. But the odds of that are a million to one (and yes, I know how often those happen).
Headlines, as reported by the UK papers:
The Sun - Space Rock Shock!
The Guardian - Truss: Labour budget affected asteroid path
Daily Mail - Space collision to push house prices up, warn estate agents
Financial Times - Asteroid impact could kill thousands. FTSE, Dow and Hang Seng down 50%
Socialist Worker - Unions walk-out: "Demands for equal rights to impact ignored" claims shop floor steward
The Mirror - Lady Gaga wardrobe malfunction at awards. Does she show a nipple? (pics. pages 2,3,5-14 and 22)
>PS: Consult our free online measurement calculator
It's nonfree software; https://www.theregister.com/design_picker/79575cea356df0b71a00c2abf8804cbdfc91e2c9/page/reg-standards-converter.js
Unacceptable.
If you want a real unit convertor that respects your freedom, that is also the best unit convertor in the world, see here; https://www.gnu.org/software/units/
For example;
You have: 886*4inch
You want: metre
* 90.0176
So a bit off.