"Astronomers have revealed how they came within minutes of alerting the world to a potential asteroid strike last month.
Some scientists believed on 13 January that a 30m object, later designated 2004 AS1, had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours.
It could have caused local devastation and the researchers contemplated a call to President Bush before new data finally showed there was no danger.
The procedures for raising the alarm in such circumstances are now being revised.
At the time, the president’s team would have been putting the final touches to a speech he was due to make the following day at the headquarters of Nasa, the US space agency. "
The story goes on. Quite interesting really. Makes yer wonder…
The thing I keep asking meself is, if there was a big rock coming and it had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours, would I really want to know?
The alarm in the article was on a Tuesday. Imagine telling the boss to stuff it, running out of the office and doing… /insert something here/… for the next 36 hours, only to discover 36 hours later it missed…
And what would be the /something/ ? I really don’t know…how very sad.
My father had a book, Best Cartoons of 1946,
which had a lot of cartoons concerning people
returning from the war. In one a young man
is being ushered into his old office by the boss,
who is saying:
"Here’s your old office back again, Saunders, just
as you left it before the war.’
The office is trashed, and on the desk is a
crayon caricature of the boss with the words: ‘The Boss is
a Pig!’ Best
I have found a Mexican restaurant that makes a Margarita that’s kind of like getting your brains smashed out by a piece of lime wrapped around a gold brick. Too bad our oxygen-rich atmosphere would ignite in contact with a real Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
A 30 meter object is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but we’re not talking even close to an extinction level event here. If we’re lucky, it would hit someplace useless like the ocean (2/3rds of the earth is covered with it - a pretty good chance ya know!) or maybe a desert, or Newark.
But this type of thing actually happens all the time in space - particularly in the inner solar system. Here’s an interesting fact:
The space shuttle orbiters measure as follow:
Orbiter Length: 37.19 m (122 feet)
Orbiter Wingspan: 23.77 m (78 feet)
And weigh approximately (depends on how they are set up and their current payload):
Total Weight at Lift-off: 2.04 million kg (4.5 million pounds)
Maximum Payload Weight: 26,786 kg (59,000 pounds)
We all saw what happened to the shuttle Columbia last February when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Such a tragedy…but also bear in mind that happened to a spacecraft that was designed to repeatedly exit and enter the earth’s atmosphere. If you subject a rock or ball of ice from space to those same conditions, the likelyhood of a major impact resulting from a 30 meter object is pretty small.
Still - there is a risk and it is important for people to watch and monitor (as bet they can) the passing of these objects. It’s just important to remember that even if there WAS a way to reliably predict when an object of a size sufficient enough to cause large scale damage was to hit earth, there is little or nothing we can do about it now. Again, just hope it hits Newark instead of you.
But as the story said: “And 2004 AS1? It turned out to be bigger than anyone had thought - about 500m wide. It eventually passed the Earth at a distance of about 12 million km - 32 times the Earth-Moon distance, posing no danger to us whatsoever.”
Bloomie - I worked at the local planetarium for the last 1o years - we routinely had speakers (from all over the world as well as NASA) offering lectures on extinction level events, we produced several star shows and bought others from worldwide science centers regarding the subject. It’s just not possible to wipe out [life on] a planet with an object that small. It can of course cause a pretty noticeable local disturbance where it hits though depending on its velocity and angle of incidence to the atmosphere.
Take a look at Meteor Crater in Arizona:
Barringer Meteor Crater is the first confirmed
meteor impact crater on Earth and was formed
approximately 50,000 years ago
by the impact of a 150ft. diameter Meteor
with released 20 Megatons of explosive power
to create a crater 750 feet deep and 4000 feet across
This is still certainly no small boom. To put it into perspective, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 12.5 and 20 kilotons - equal to 12,500 and 20,000 pounds of TNT explosive respectively. The crater in AZ was caused by an explosion - about 1,000 times greater. Even at this, while the devtsation this impact caused was keenly felt at the site of impact and surrounding area (several states worth of distance), it still didn’t come close to killing off half or more of the species of earth.
But again, even today there is probably nothing much we could do even if we wanted to to divert this type of a strike…
Hey Pat, I lived through one of those, once. We had a big blast out here in the desert, left a big impression. I prefer the kind that Ginger-ly strikes deep in the heartland, but it’s the fallout I don’t like. Like Brian says, today there is probably nothing much we could do even if we wanted to to divert this type of a strike
Good thing I didn’t hear about it. Woul’da ordered every whistle possible by COD and hope for impact. Then I could have holed up in a cave with enough food, water, and whistles to survive the ice age.
Well, the ocean is not quite a useless place to hit. After all, water is non-compressible fluid and the waves could do just as much damage or worse.
Maybe someplace like Siberia, where the last one came down. The other possibility is whereeer politicians go hide when there’s a national emergency (Is that the Newark place that your talking about?)
I think in this instance, we can thank the Crystal People and Dale’s Planetary Reception Network for using their secret Anti-gravity beam to knock the asteroid off course. It was probably test fired from an undisclosed location outside of Birmingham AL.
).
