Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost Panic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us. The supposedly planet-menacing 100-foot-(30-metre)-diameter space rock, dubbed 2006 QV89, was discovered in August 2006. Following observations over ten days back then, …
For anyone interested, Purdue university has an online Asteroid damage calculator if you have enough numbers to put in.
Of course it won't tell you exactly where a hit is likely to take place, so you will know if there is going to be a large bang but not if you will be part of it.
30m is big enough to cause problems if it comes down over a built up area, as opposed to the (~20m) Chelyabinsk meteor which fortunately came down outside of town, but still caused thousands of injuries.
Sure, injuries from flying glass might not kill you, but it can't be much fun.
Also, an awful lot depends on the angle at which it hits the atmosphere. A glancing blow like Tunguska is pretty bad, but if the Tunkuska strike had been vertical it wouldn't have broken up very much before impact. A Richter 5 would have turned into something very much bigger than that with a huge surface wave component.
The big problem with any meteor of this size is that unless in barrels out of the sky near vertically down (planetary bullseye) it's highly likely to not cause enough damage to keep anyones attention for more than a day or two.
Not knowing the meteor composition, that is approaching at a low angle the effects could range from pretty upper atmosphere fireworks (composition is mostly ice/gravel) to leaving a long trail of increasing damage from the supersonic shockwave before it either airbursts from thermal stress or impacts, both would be in the megaton range (composition is near solid Iron)
Chelyabinsk was a shallow angle entry and detonation at over 18 miles altitude, about as safe as it gets for a 20m lump of rock, If it had entered the atmosphere via the shortest route to ground there would have been something like 100 square miles of total destruction and a sizable crater.
So far we've been lucky riding the probability curve for 20m+ meteors, 70% arrive over the sea, most arrive at a shallow angle, most miss populated areas.
The ultra-famous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely invisible.
Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense Lux-O-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn’t going to make it.
So, he and his friends, and his friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company, put in what now is widely recognized as being the hardest night’s work in history, and, sure enough, on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible.
Effrafax lost his bet — and therefore his life — simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be he didn’t trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon.
Note - I was initially going to go with a Somebody Elses Problem Field.
RIMMER: What were they?
HOLLY: Grit. Five specks of grit on the scanner-scope. See, the thing
about grit is, it’s black, and the thing about scanner-scopes…
RIMMER: Oh, shut up.
LISTER: (Sighs.) Come on. Let’s go.
Jokes aside, isn't that a little worrying about our chances to detect any incoming asteroids early enough to be able to do something about them?
Here we have a known object coming at us, and yet we can't spot it...
.
Somebody will retort that it's a relatively small one, the "wipe out civilization" sizes would be much easier to spot at a distance, but in this case we know it's there, we have a pretty good idea where it should be, we are actively looking for it, and yet... Besides, it might not be huge, but it is definitely inside the lower size limit of flying boulders that could ruin someone's life, and thus we'd like to be able to get some advance warning for. It puts the whole "keep an eye out for potential dangers" promise in perspective.
"Here we have a known object coming at us, and yet we can't spot it..."
Isn't that the point though? 10 years ago they estimated a 1:7000 chance of it hitting. Now they are looking at where it would have to be if it was actually going to hit us and they can't find it, despite knowing that they can see objects of that size at that distance. Ergo, it's not there, ie not in the area where it would have to be to hit us.
But we can't trust todays scientists! They are full of fake news. How else do you think they get their research money, or push the socialist agenda?
The asteroid is still there.The Chinese want you to think it's gone to lull you into a false sense of security.
(I feel the need to add "*sarcasm*" - not because of El Reg readers, but because of the state of humanity at the moment.)
@ThatONE; "Jokes aside, isn't that a little worrying about our chances to detect any incoming asteroids early enough to be able to do something about them?
Here we have a known object coming at us, and yet we can't spot it..."
What's so worrying? Space is really , enormously huge. Vast, even. In that immensity, a 20m bouder is teeny-tiny and difficult to spot. And, being that size, is also easily perturbed by the gravitational fields of the larger bodies in the solar system. Also easily turned into gravel by anything hitting it with enough kinetic energy. So in the 13 years where it hasn't been continuously tracked*, there are a LOT of things that might've happened to cause it to not reappear where we expect it. And if it is still intact and on-course to collide, it;s known where to look. They looked, didn;t find it. Therefore it;s either changed orbits or destroyed and in any case will not be hittin us in 2019.
What's to worry about?
*NB: continuous tracking would not be possible, in any case. Too few resources to do so, too many objects to track, too small, often too far away, and occassionaly the Sun gets in the line of sight...
I cannot think of any particularly plausible mechanism for this, so I can only wonder if it is possible that a small asteroid, over the course of 13 years, might experience a dramatic decline in albedo. The ESO VLT means scientists are using passive optical telescopes to search for 2006 QV89, in which case it follows they expect the thing to reflect enough sunlight to be visible. Which led me to think that we'll all be embarrassed if the thing swam through a cloud of interplanetary cruft at some point, lost its reflectivity under, say, a layer of carbon dust, and falls into the middle of London*¹ with very little warning.
Was ESO's IR-spectrum capability put to use as well? Might be useful insurance if not ...
⁞
*¹ The timing could be handy, mind you: if a piece the size of a Volkswagen ground-zeroes on Downing Street, your headline might be more accurate than you ever knew.
"Indeed, there would be nobody left to say 'now is not the time' so we can hold indyref2 here in Scotland, re-acquire Berwickshire and fortify the border before anybody gets a functioning govt going in London."
Whaddya mean "re=aquire" Berwickshire? That's part of the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria. As is Edinburgh. So bog off, we're having a vote too and we want our land back! (The English can keep Liverpool though. We're magnanimous like that and anyway, we have to have Hull (although maybe someone could aim and asteroid at Hull? ))
before anybody gets a functioning govt going in London
We haven't had a functioning government in London for the last three years. If you haven't been able to get your act together, liberate Berwickshire and Rebuild That Wall in that time I don't hold out much hope of you achieving anything over the next two months.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
