Asteroid threat demands response, experts warn
Kamchatkans and Venezuelans beware. A 20-million-tonne asteroid could be heading your way. Californians have even more reason to worry – the asteroid is more likely to hit the Pacific Ocean, triggering a tsunami that could devastate the west coast of North America.
These are among the scenarios projected for asteroid Apophis, which researchers now say has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth on 13 April 2036. Calculations show it would strike somewhere along a narrow track that stretches eastward from Siberia to the west coast of Africa.
This is a job for Superman, but we’ll just have to rely on . . . *gulp*
“Someone will have to make a decision,” says Russell Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut and founder of the Association of Space Explorers. Because any plan for deflecting the asteroid away from Earth will need to be implemented well before an impact site is precisely known, he says, “this is inherently going to be an international decision”.
. . . .
Beginning in the next few months, Schweickart’s group will host a series of meetings to provide the UN with a ‘decision process’ for assessing and acting on the hazard posed by Apophis and other near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). A draft document ready for consideration by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is expected by 2009.
Who will promptly begin issuing resolutions demanding that the asteroid open itself up to inspection, thus revealing whether and where exactly it intends to hit Earth. My guess is that as is typical of militant asteroids, it simply does not care that asteroid impact damage is disproportionately borne by the poor and underprivileged, and that appeals to its compassion and reason will be fruitless.
Experts also stress that nuking the thing could create greater problems: a multitude of smaller but still very damaging bits. One of them considers a “gravitational tractor” the best bet for steering the errant asteroid (which is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions) away from Earth:
Lu’s favoured option is called a gravitational tractor. It involves placing a relatively massive spacecraft near enough to an approaching asteroid to shift its trajectory using only the minuscule force of gravity between the two objects. Although the method requires significant lead time and will not work in all cases, it has the advantage of controlling a hazardous object “in one piece”, say Lu
The United States will be asked to contribute the space vehicle that will tractor the errant body out of its present threatening course, but the French will demand that they have charge of the mission. Hugo Chavez will denounce US space imperialism.
The Earth will get hit with a extinction event asteroid. It is not a matter of if, but when.
We have only two defenses:
A) extraterristrial colonies
B) well developed deep space capabilities.
If the government is not willing to do these things they need to get out of the way and let private industry do it. The developments with Rutan/Branson, and their various competitors have been very encouraging.
But isn’t it a quagmire?
Earth will burn to a cinder looong before an asteroid strike, hell, an asteroid might just save us. Save us from the Capitalist menace that is consuming our mother Gaia (seems like it needs more vowels).
Well, it probably would put a period to global warming.
There is no cause for alarm.
I have already declared victory over the rogue asteroid and obliged it to leave the thread.
Here’s what we do. We all get into our SUVs here in the Northern Hemisphere, and we run the engines continuously for a year. That will warm the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere, eliminating the tropopause and causing ionized gases from the upper atmosphere to vent into space. This will shift the earth southward just enough for the asteroid to miss us.
I call it the ‘DUCK!!!” maneuver.
Thass it. Gone to Texas.
The West Coast is transnationally fucked.
This is the “nuclear winter” event that will stave off disaster from global warming. You just can’t please some people.
You are my kind of physicist, McGehee.
If we all dropped our clutches simultaneously, we could probably spin the globe through 45 degrees so the asteroid would land on Tehran.
BALLOON FENCE!
Of course it may just land in the ocean with a loud slosh
Apophis? Buncha SG-1 geeks.
Shoulda named it “Hamner-Brown”.
Bush is far more threatening than some puny asteroid.
moonbat/
A mile high berm of Oreo cookies. It wouldn’t stop an asteroid ,but it would sure be cool.
Well, there’s one silver lining in all this. We’ll get to regard those who pooh-pooh the danger as deniers of the coming bolide genocide, just like those who deny the Holocaust, or global warming.
(I want credit for coining this term, by the way.)
We’d need to drain Lake Michigan and refill it with milk.
This is the solution provided by Real President Al Gore to global warming. He will have a clause inserted in the Kyoto Protocols which will ban doing anything to deflect a global cooling event.
Oh, Crawford, you thought you had us fooled, but now you’ve let your Freudian slip show. You Niven fan, you.
Chant along with me: one chance in 45,000…so, what’s a 250m-diameter (depending on density; if it’s nickel-iron, much smaller) asteroid between friends?
Anyway, any bets that the Hammer will fall on a Tuesdae?
But if we kill this asteroid, won’t we just create more? We don’t want to make this asteroid mad. Perhaps it’s best that we submit to the asteroid.
After the global warming funding bonanza, it has been obvious for some time that the way to the government’s wallet is through deadly apocalypse projections. NASA planetary scientists are feeling particularly dejected due to funding cuts for manned space by the Bush administration. Answer: Attack of the killer asteroids.
NASA planetary scientists are feeling particularly dejected due to funding cuts for manned space by the Bush administration.
By and large, NASA planetary scientists do not cry many tears over cuts in manned space flight, because more manned space flights mean less money for scientifically-useful unmanned probes.
Well, it ain’t gonna fall on a Hot Fudge Sundae.
(I’d say I’m amazed that book’s never been made into a movie, but then I remember the gang that turned cannibal and the heroes including the staff of a nuclear power plant and realize why.)
Lemme see…implication here is this is roughly a four-sigma event, so the asteroid is expected to pass through a “window” approximately 120 million nautical miles wide. Let’s call it a couple of hundred billion meters. Now, let’s convert that to velocity: couple of hundred billion meters divided by 39 years x 365days x 24 hours x 3600 seconds gives us 180 meters per second, four sigma, or about 45 m/s one-sigma. Not all that accurate, but not bad. But that’s neglecting probably the most important source of error: the integral of perturbations over the next 39 years of flight.
Not declaring this a whole lot of hogwash, but I’m not sure NASA’s predictive ability can be quite that good.
Oh, and hey, look! I got the diameter right! 250 meters!
But it’s kinda slow, and so even less dangerous.
See ya later51, time to stock up on canned goods, firearms, and miscellaneous pool-supply chemicals.
This is only one. With new imaging technology that will be in place by 2010 “scientists” (given the current state of affairs, this term always needs scare quotes) predict finding an additional 20,000 rocks that could cause us a problem.
Call the UN stat!
There was a TV-movie some years ago where that actually happened. Apparently some advanced race somewhere had the bright idea that they could communicate with us by throwing giant rocks at our planet, and when we started deflecting their “messages” they started, er, spamming us.
At the end of the movie there were suddenly hundreds of asteroids bearing down on planet earth.
I never did figure out why an advanced extraterrestrial civilization capable of traveling across interstellar space thought throwing rocks through our “window” was a way to make friends. But I guess if the script’s writers weren’t brainless hacks the thing never would have gotten made, let alone broadcast.
True enough. Near-earth asteroids tend not to have a whole lot of differential motion compared to the earth. It’s the comets, especially the long-period comets, that can pack a wallop.
I’m just recalling that some of the missile defense systems I worked on had geometries where the closing velocity could be at least three or four times as high. But in none of those were we throwing together masses of tens of millions of tons.
IIRC Lucifer’s Hammer was over a cubic mile of roughly water-density (average) material. Reaching around (stop it) to the bookshelf, they have it massed out at 3-4 billion tons, with a closing velocity of roughly 50 km/s. So we’re talking roughly 200 times the mass, and approximately eight times the impact velocity, so: thirteen thousand times the energy.
Only thirteen thousand. Sheesh.