…because they happen more often than you might think.
Looks like we're off the hook for Apophis…but keep a weather eye out…
by CJ | Jan 14, 2013 | Journal | 10 comments
10 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
What a name! It inspires dread. Glad they ruled it out. I wonder why they called the the 40-meter sized one that is to fly by the middle of next month 2012 DA14? Surely, they could have come up with a better name? Maybe another ancient Egyptian moniker?
The ones that NEARLY hit us are so numerous we would have to start calling them Sam and Nancy and Richard. The reason Apophis got its name was because there was a bettin’ chance it might hit us, so it needed a scary name to get public attention—that’s my theory, at least.
By definition, if it’s large enough to be tracked more than a couple months out, it probably is named. We’ve had recent misses close enough to skip off the atmosphere, but those were all pretty small (by cosmic standpoints), no bigger than a van. Our detection has gotten fairly good over the years.
I wouldn’t rule out a strike by Apophus just yet… 2036 is when all the Unix calendars expire
— oops, I mean roll over 😀
And note this:
quote>>>(Spaceguard) discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
<<<unquote.
But can't do anything to remove them if they are a hazard. 🙁
That’s why we need to be able to get into space and mine asteroids. Processing an asteroid for ores and minerals would pretty much total one out.
Doing something about one would be on the order of a game of cosmic pickup sticks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick-up_sticks) Gravitationally speaking, everything affects everything else. Nudging the orbit of one object could have disastrous consequences on down the line. And, if impact was unavoidable, unless you could completely vaporize it, you would have the choice of being slammed by the whole asteroid, or being pelted by chunks and pieces of it. Of course, if it was far enough away, you could bomb blast it into big chunks, and then keep shooting missiles at the chunks until you’d broken them into pieces small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. . . . which would delight the military types who’ve been longing to shoot missiles and blow up something. . . .
Just so we don’t have 77185 Cherryh (SPK ID: 2077185) crossing our orbit. But then, it’s a main belt asteroid, so I’m not too worried.
Apophis. I’d make a Stargate reference, but that asteroid’s too risky. I just finished watching How the Universe Works last week, and they were talking about what size asteroids could do what kind of damage, including Apophis. It was shocking how small something could be, and do such major damage to a city, continent, or the whole planet. And these were *conservative* estimates.
There was also mention of a mission to look over an asteroid, a major study, coming up in 2014.
Their conclusions? (1) Don’t destroy an asteroid and turn one big rock into lots of smaller rocks headed for lots of landfall strikes. Instead, deflect the asteroid into an orbit that won’t hit Earth. (2) Use the asteroid for a space station/colony and use the raw materials for building spaceships. But of course, to do those, you need something that can move the asteroid into a safe orbit.
I don’t remember the whole litany from “Integral Trees”, but it includes “faster takes you out, slower takes you in”. Orbital dynamics can be be pretty non-intuitive. A near miss could be optimal.
It’s finally raining here (speaking of weather eyes). Thank you anyone who voted to send their rain over here. Normally by this time of the year, we would have had 3 or 4 big rains; this is the first one this year, and it couldn’t come too soon. We have been on drought alert off and on the past several years. The neighbors have been having a big get together all weekend long, and a barbecue pit was blowing smoke straight into our house since Friday. I’m sorry their party is disrupted, but at least the smog generator is rained out.