Small Asteroid To Pass Close To Earth Tomorrow 126
Matt_dk writes "A small asteroid will pass very close to Earth this Tuesday. Astronomers are still tracking the object, now designated as 2010 TD54, and various estimates say it should come within anywhere from 52,000 km (33,000 miles) to 64,000 km (40,000 miles) on October 12, with closest approach at approximately 11:25 UT."
Fuuny coincidence? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news "retired Air Force officer, Stanley A. Fulham", whoever that guy might be, "predicts October 13, 2010 as the date for a massive UFO display over the world’s principal cities". ;-) Given the distance, can we really be sure it is an asteroid ?
http://www.disclose.tv/forum/october-13-2010-worldwide-ufo-display-t33304.html [disclose.tv]
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...through the services of a world renowned channeler, the author has communicated with an ethereal group of entities known as the Transcendors... "
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In realty, we are called the Asgards, how dare you doubt our existence ?
We continue to exist and influence things long after the last of us has left its primitive physical body ;-)
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"I don't think that they are here by the way. They're probably too busy doing alien stuff"
Rectal probing rednecks?!! Eeek, that means that they are here!! That's like, proof or something!
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Agreed. If our puny weapons wouldn't even dent their equimolecular unobtainium hulls they'd have no need to be stealthy.
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But a jet flying at night/under cover of darkness etc is somewhere that woodenboattimesfolk wouldn't be able to see/detect so the jet would easily be stealthy if flying high at night, painted black.
Da Alienz could simply know where we're looking and be avoiding those areas, or finding ways to hide like inside large storms (no idea if humans can see inside a tornado fully, so it's a wild guess) or hell even be hiding in a volcano, or deeeeeeep in the ocean.
We still haven't explored all of this planet as far
Just in case... (Score:5, Funny)
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Are you sure Centauri isn't planning on dropping a bunch of arcade machines [wikipedia.org]?
Re:teh centauri are invading (Score:4, Funny)
Nonsense. This was obviously a rock launched via Bug Plasma, an attack which fortunately will miss us. Join the Mobile Infantry and fight back before they succeed and destroy Buenos Aires!
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Would you like to know more?
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nah, leave that annoying Russian guy on the asteroid instead.
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But be sure to take his wrench. You never know...
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I admit I don't get whatever reference you're trying to make here.
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Russian Reversal (with Magic card) (Score:2)
Good use of the Russian Reversal there I'll admit, but I was talking about Peter Stormare's Lev Andropov character in the 1998 film, in case y'all didn't pick up on that.
My previously-designed Magic card for Yakov:
Name: Yakov Smirnoff
Mana Cost: 1 Blue, 1 Colorless
Legendary Creature - Human
Rules Text: Untap Yakov, pay 1, say something that refers to a Slashdot meme: Switch target creature’s power and toughness until end of turn.
Flavor Text: In Soviet Cartamundi plant, cardboard prints YOU!
Power/Toughne
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I am not really up on films for the most part, old or new, so I'm gonna have to trust you on that one. :P
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I haven't watched the other vids, but I do like the way Stormare handles it.
Kind of interesting to be surprised by an actor in a different type of role.
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Yeah, Pacino was about as subtle as Sherman's March, similar for the guy who he was feeding off of.
Yeah, 'tis an iconic character
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Works for me.
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Please place Bruce Willis on standby.
Yet another stupid movie. 1st off, they'll need to reach the asteroid when it is within the shuttle's range (600 miles), which gives them about 1 second to drill their hole, insert the a-bomb, and detonate it. Which would just leave a large cluster of radioactive debris crashing into the Earth a few seconds later.
Even if you extended the Shuttles range 10x, that would still give you less than a minute to do something.
Blowing it up into tiny fragments would still not stop it's destructive effects. All that m
Re:Just in case... (Score:4, Funny)
Did you miss the part where the movie starred Bruce Willis?
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Stupid movie.
I've never seen a major blockbuster movie where everyone agrees, "That's exactly how it works in real life!"
Movies are stupid. They're fantasy, an escape from reality. That's how they work.
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I've been hoping for that for years.
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Giant, triangular spaceship at the ready. (pew pew pew) You have impulse engines and HyperSpace too, just hit the "HyperSpace" button, or pull back on the stick, if a dedicated button is unavailable. You have three chances. Watch out when the asteroid breaks into slightly smaller chunks! Oh, and there might be an alien or two out to shoot at you. Other than that should be smooth asteroid hunting. Good luck, Captain!
Not a lot of advance warning... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was kinda alarmed when I read the name "2010 T" which means it was discovered in the first half of October, 2010 (as opposed to discovered in the second half via time travel). And in fact TFA says it was discovered Oct 9.
TFA also says it's a pretty small asteroid only a few meters across, which is a pretty good excuse for not finding it sooner (and makes it Mostly Harmless), but still... More funding to asteroid finding/tracking pls thx.
I'm not. (Score:1)
OTOH, driving (traffic accidents) and heart disease is something that I'm mildly concerned about. The odds are, those are things will take me out prematurely.
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Sure if all you care about is yourself.
Me, I think it's pretty rational to be alarmed by things with the highest probability of killing me or someone I love, or things with a very low probability of killing me, everyone I know and love, and possibly the entire human species.
In the latter category asteroid impacts would be less alarming than the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I think my level of concern is commensurate with that reality.
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You can do shit about it, so be worried! (Score:2)
Then you can stop worrying about asteroids from space - can't do anything about them anyway.
Of course we can do something about asteroids from space! It's actually quite simple conceptually, and quite feasible technologically, to prevent a catastrophic asteroid impact, if and only if you detect them sufficiently far -- as in years -- in advance. A spacecraft of reasonable mass equipped with ion engines for long-term station keeping could act as a gravity tractor and pull the asteroid out of the impact tra
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Are you *really* unable to tell the difference, and understand why the latter isn't worth worrying about?
Obviously I'm able to tell the difference, having explained it. And obviously you're unable understand why the latter is worth some degree of concern.
Your risk assessment only includes the probability of an outcome and not the cost of that outcome, and thus you fail risk assessment.
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Alarmed is certainly an overreaction. However, that doesn't mean it should be ignored -- kind of like terrorism. Plus, unlike terrorism, taking precautions on the NEO threat doesn't interfere with civil rights, and hasn't seen significant overreaction on the part of the general public.
Detection programs cost tens of millions of dollars, and even a mitigation testbed for a modest sized asteroid is only around $500 million. These kinds of programs have scientific benefit as well (and costs are on par with
Re:Not a lot of advance warning... (Score:4, Insightful)
Heh, yeah, I can see it now.
"Why does the President want to spend money looking at the sky?! He should be looking at the bottom line!"
"Is there something he doesn't want us to find on the ground?"
"Look, the Earth is 75% water and only half of it would be facing bombardment. Add that up and we've got a negative 25% chance to be hit!"
"Asteroid monitoring? What's the use in that?"
Cue asteroid strike a la Bobby Jindal and volcano monitoring [huffingtonpost.com].
oblig (Score:2)
no bigger than a chihuahua's head.
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Or about the size of 1 book from the Library of Congress.
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Why is this news? (Score:2)
A five-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 30 million would be expected to pass daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike Earth’s atmosphere about every 2 years on average.If an asteroid of the size of 2010 TD54 were to enter Earth’s atmosphere, it would be expected to burn up high in the atmosphere and cause no damage to Earth’s surface.
Is it because we know about it? If this happens daily and would cause no harm if striking the Earth...then why is it newsworthy?
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Is it because we know about it?
Bingo. This time we found it 2 or so days ahead of closest approach. Usually we don't find out until you look up and see a meteor streaking across the sky, or even worse, discover it a couple days later in historical photos.
I always thought from a ham radio perspective it would be interesting to try "scheduled meteor scatter" not where you schedule an attempt in a general sense and hope a meteor flys by, but where you select your little individual tiny meteor. Would certainly save a lot of overheated amp
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Normally the term "meteor scatter" describes using the ion trail of micrometeors (sand size and smaller) to bounce a VHF/UHF signal further than line of sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_burst_communications [wikipedia.org]
73 de w7com
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
First, yes, because we know about it.
Second, because this is actually passing much closer than the lunar orbit and is thus not a daily event.
Third, because we do know about it, but also know it would most likely cause no damage, is information worth conveying.
Fourth, because some of us are quite interested in space and space objects and the field of asteroid tracking, especially as it relates to near earth objects.
Fifth, because there's a slim chance we could see it! TFA says you'd need a "moderate" sized telescope, which could mean a lot of things in different contexts. The JPL NEO tracker page gives an absolute planetary magnitude of 28, which if my math is right is 10.8 apparent magnitude ideally (i.e. appears 'full' from our perspective, is roughly spherical etc) Which would be within the capabilities of plenty of amateur telescopes.
Ultimately and obviously, how much this is newsworthy to you is subjective. But I think it's cool.
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Check out this video [youtube.com].
An animated overview of the Solar System showing the last 30 years of asteroid discoveries and their orbits. It's to scale, created from real data. Pretty awesome.
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You: Second, because this is actually passing much closer than the lunar orbit and is thus not a daily event.
TFA: A five-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 30 million would be expected to pass daily within a lunar distance,
Guess which half?
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Sorry, I don't get your meaning. Are you saying you think they're low-balling the number of asteroids that pass within a lunar distance to earth? Or high-balling? Because otherwise, it's kind of a given that if passing within a lunar distance is a daily event, that passing much closer would be much-squared less frequent.
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We certainly would want astronomy to interfere with an Apple story on /., now would we~
Geosync is only 26200 miles (Score:4, Interesting)
Geosync is only 26200 miles ... the uncertainty is almost large enough that it could hit a geosync satellite. If only they provided a std deviation or some other probability metric.
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Re:Geosync is only 26200 miles (Score:4, Funny)
There is a lot of volume in space.
Incorrect... there is no sound in space.
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Also no beards in space [vimeo.com].
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There is a lot of volume in space.
I believe this [brainyquote.com] is what you meant to say.
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put one pin on a random lane in a bowling alley. Blindfold yourself at the entrance to the alley, then walk to the lane and bowl the pin down.
It's kinda like that, only the pin is also moving at 7,000 mph
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put one pin on a random lane in a bowling alley. Blindfold yourself at the entrance to the alley, then walk to the lane and bowl the pin down.
It's kinda like that, only the pin is also moving at 7,000 mph
And the pin is a critical piece of national infrastructure, that costs $10B to replace, with a multi year lead time... and you don't get to toss one ball, but randomly a couple per month, almost all of which we don't know about until after the ball is thrown... I wouldn't expect failure every time, or even a given time, but its gotta happen sooner or later.
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The JPL HORIZONS data tend to have covariance data for their ephemerides. Might look it up there if you're interested. Unfortunately, six-state covariance matrices don't fit well in public articles, a range of values which probably correspond to an RMS 3-sigma value are the best you're going to get.
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If an object large enough to cause a global catastrophe was on it's way toward us, we would have way more advance warning than 3 days with these kinds of efforts.
So we'd have plenty of time to get out of the way....whew!
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About half the asteroids that could hit us come from the daytime sky
Well this is obviously why we have observatories in Australia. Duh!
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There are a stupefying number of untracked asteroids out there, including ones with irregular orbits that could easily be too far away or simply missed while we're both on the same side of the sun. Also, an asteroid doesn't have to be extremely large to cause an incredible amount of damage. Even an asteroid only a little bigger than this flyby could level a city. Tunguska was estimated to only be a few tens of meters across.
And that's not even considering asteroids with insanely low albedo. We're not even c
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It depends on it's approach to the earth. Coming from the direction of the sun, then maybe not.
close? (Score:2)
from TFA:
"its closest approach to Earth's surface at an altitude of about 45,000 kilometers"
Only in astronomical terms would 45,000 KM be called close...
"At that time, the asteroid will be over southeastern Asia in the vicinity of Singapore. "
And I would not call 45,000km as "in the vicinity of' when even South America is only about 1/5 of the distance further away...
Re:close? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the other hand, was discovered just 2 days ago. If a bigger one coming with a bit more accuracy is discovered now won't be anything that could be done, the plans that are actually to deal with possible impacts implies maybe years,
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In space, the sound you hear is not Doppler.
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I think what they mean to say is that the point on the Earth that the asteroid will be directly over at closest approach is in the vicinity of Singapore, not the asteroid itself.
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Comparisons (Score:5, Informative)
Geosynchronous orbit: 26,200 miles
Moon: 236,216 miles
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International Space Station: 229 miles
Geosynchronous orbit: 26,200 miles
Moon: 236,216 miles
What about the important stuff? Nearest McDonalds?
Hype? (Score:3, Informative)
A five-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 30 million would be expected to pass daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike Earth’s atmosphere about every 2 years on average.
So really this happens all the time.
If an asteroid of the size of 2010 TD54 were to enter Earth's atmosphere, it would be expected to burn up high in the atmosphere and cause no damage to Earth's surface.
AND nobody will notice if it does decide to visit our planet. Maybe it will even hit one of those "dead satellites" and do its bit to clean up the junk in geosync for us.
I suspect this article is nothing but NASA's way of saying "moar $$$ pl0x!!!!!1"
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Yes, it happens all the time and satellites get hit way less than the earth because, think about it, their surface area is *way* less. Sadly, hitting satellites will make the orbital debris problem worse since every hit just makes more smaller pieces. Even little pieces are a disaster for other satellites at 10km/second, though they fall out of orbit faster.
Interestingly, the frequency of hits is inversely proportional to mass (weight) of the object. Guessing this thing weighs about a 100 tonnes (probabl
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If ti heats a satellite, it could trigger a cascade event by spreading debris. So yeah, it could be an huge issue.
It's an important issue, and there needs to be funding for a global search for the objects.
Small Asteroid To Pass Close To Earth Tomorrow.... (Score:3, Funny)
...but will not, alas, hit it.
Why is the post-apocalyptic paradise just out of reach? After 40 years of Cold War teasing, I was almost ready to give up hope, but asteroids still mock us. I cry at all the missed opportunities.
If I might be so bold (Score:1)
Do some people gonna die? (Score:1)
You know it's going to change course and enter earth's atmosphere, unleashing a horde of super-nanonites that will massively replicate and rapidly consume all the resources of earth.....
Finally we get our flying car ! (Score:2)
Don't complain about stupid jokes. In space no one can hear you, on Slashdot no one cares.
move along, nothing to see here (Score:2)
Move along, nothing to see here.
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This is not the asteroid we're looking for?
Message recieved from asteroid: (Score:2)
Night of the Asteroid! (Score:1)
What are the correct precautions? (Score:1)
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Lay down and put a paper bag over your head.
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Did this get modded offtopic by someone who just didn't get the Lucifer's Hammer reference?