'Damn close' asteroid due to miss hitting us this time ... but only just.

buried

Akrasia wrote: »

Yeah, f*ck these guys




Can't see how sending a load of lads from Guantanamo Bay is going to help any! They'd probably start pushing the bastard quicker to make sure we get got

Akrasia

Why would I?
That fella has a knack for escaping all on his own

Avatar MIA

Akrasia wrote: »

Why would I?
That fella has a knack for escaping all on his own

Just sayin, don't come crying to me when we're all bending the knee to Zod.

Sand

Akrasia wrote: »

Why use an Icbm to target something a hundred thousand kilometers away, use a rocket and just put a nuke as it's payload (if that's what you want to do)

You say that like it would be a piece of piss to hit something house sized a hundred thousand km away. With an unproven payload. Humanity managed to land on a comet vastly, vastly bigger than a house. The vehicle used launched in 2004, reached the comet 10 years later and took 3 months to actually plot and complete the landing. The only 'off the shelf' solution for nuking something far away is ICBMs. Everything else is science fiction, and without a decade or more of lead time I wouldn't be as confident as you.

Capt'n Midnight

Sand wrote: »

I wouldn't assume tbh. The maximum range of an ICBM is about 11,500 km.

That's just the horizontal distance

The vertical distance is ... oh wait , nevermind

Avatar MIA

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The vertical distance is ... oh wait , nevermind

In space... no one can hear say BOOM!

jimmycrackcorm

Permabear wrote:

This post had been deleted.

Didn't he die the last time. Already priced he can't do the job properly.

YFlyer

LordSutch wrote: »

The ESA says it is far enough to just miss our geostationary satellites orbiting at about 22,000 miles (35,405km)".

From the moon?

gw80

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

That's just the horizontal distance

The vertical distance is ... oh wait , nevermind

Im no astro physicist, but wouldent anything fired into space just keep going at the same speed and direction even after the fuel has run out, with there being no friction in space?

YFlyer

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

That's just the horizontal distance

The vertical distance is ... oh wait , nevermind

Curvature distance.

CruelCoin

Sand wrote: »

I wouldn't assume tbh. The maximum range of an ICBM is about 11,500 km. So actually, the Earth doesn't actually have the capacity to even hit this 'near miss' asteroid with its nukes as its out of range. And sending up nukes (perhaps multiple nukes- its the only way to be sure) at that sort of range to the earth has to lead to fallout. As for capacity, NASA is probably the best funded space program and it is so underfunded that since the retirement of the shuttle (without replacement) it relies on Russia to get its astronauts to the ISS. If an asteroid is spotted with say a 2-3 month lead time, I wouldn't expect decades of neglect to suddenly be recovered.

That's the range of an ICBM in the exit from earths atmosphere, it's brief visit to space, and it's return through the atmosphere.

But this rocket would be going to space and staying in it.

Whatever the velocity it achieves when it reaches space will be it's velocity it maintains forever, because its a vacuum and there is no (?) drag. though i'm open to correction from space nerds?

Our ICBMS would have no trouble reaching this asteroid. The real trick will be getting the maths right, but that would also be fine seeing as how we landed something on a comet 1.5billion kilometers away

Sam Kade

LordSutch wrote: »

Very scary when you think about it.

A house sized meteor - due to shoot past Earth (between us and the moon), but just missing our orbiting satellites (this time)!

http://news.sky.com/story/damn-close-asteroid-due-to-speed-past-earth-10982627

I don't know what we're going to do when of these things really hit us. Trump, North Korea & Brexit will be the last things on our minds as an impact date is announced > sometime in the not so distant future?

One of Kim Jong Un's inter ballistic missiles would be like a wasp sting by comparison.

Do you know that meteorites break up as soon as they enter the earths atmosphere? So a house size would be in bits by the time it would land also they won't be still burning by the time they land.

Darkglasses

CruelCoin wrote: »

That's the range of an ICBM in the exit from earths atmosphere, it's brief visit to space, and it's return through the atmosphere.

But this rocket would be going to space and staying in it.

Whatever the velocity it achieves when it reaches space will be it's velocity it maintains forever, because its a vacuum and there is no (?) drag. though i'm open to correction from space nerds?

Our ICBMS would have no trouble reaching this asteroid. The real trick will be getting the maths right, but that would also be fine seeing as how we landed something on a comet 1.5billion kilometers away

In outer space yes - but the Earth's gravitational pull is strong and has influence a large distance out. . Current ICBM could not just be pointed "up" and continue off into space forever - practically no rocket ever could. Space travel requires a more complicated journey - reaching an orbit, shedding excess mass and exiting means you do not fight against gravity to nearly the same degree.

Kerbal Space Programme is a great game for learning this stuff practically

gctest50

Sam Kade wrote: »

Do you know that meteorites break up as soon as they enter the earths atmosphere? So a house size would be in bits by the time it would land also they won't be still burning by the time they land.

The Vredesfort one was the size of a mountain, left a 300 kilometer wide impact

Might spill the tea all over the hang sangwiches at the picnic that

Sam Kade

gctest50 wrote: »

The Vredesfort one was the size of a mountain, left a 300 kilometer wide impact

Might spill the tea all over the hang sangwiches at the picnic that

That was 2 billion years ago, everything was haywire back then.

Hal1

I'm waiting on the return of Apophis, set to make a return in 2032. It last made the news in 2004...

99942 Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 because initial observations indicated a probability of up to 2.7% that it would hit Earth on April 13, 2029

Mass: 26.99 billion kg
Orbital period: 324 days
Orbits: Sun
Equatorial escape velocity: ~0.52 km/h
Dimensions: 0.370 km
Absolute magnitude (H): 19.7 ± 0.4

Akrasia

gw80 wrote: »

Im no astro physicist, but wouldent anything fired into space just keep going at the same speed and direction even after the fuel has run out, with there being no friction in space?

Gravity. Its kinda why the earth isn't zooming off into interstellar space.

No ICBM is designed to achieve orbital velocity, never mind escape velocity. If you shoot a icbm straight up, it will go up, slow down due to gravity, and then fall back down

(More props to KSP)

gw80

Akrasia wrote: »

Gravity. Its kinda why the earth isn't zooming off into interstellar space.

No ICBM is designed to achieve orbital velocity, never mind escape velocity. If you shoot a icbm straight up, it will go up, slow down due to gravity, and then fall back down

(More props to KSP)

Aaaand thats why im not an astro physicist

Forgot about gravity,
So would an object always be under the influence of gravity everywhere in our solar system even if it managed to escape earths gravitational field,it would just end up in something else's pull?

Akrasia

gw80 wrote: »

Aaaand thats why im not an astro physicist

Forgot about gravity,
So would an object always be under the influence of gravity everywhere in our solar system even if it managed to escape earths gravitational field,it would just end up in something else's pull?

Everything within the Sun's sphere of influence is affected by the Sun's gravity. That's why we have comets and asteroids flying around the place, they're all orbiting the sun. (Our own sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky way galaxy)

In order to escape the sun's gravity, you need to travel away from the sun at a faster rate than the sun is pulling you back and the gravitational pull gets weaker the further you are from the centre of mass.

The earth is constantly falling into the sun, but we're also travelling in a straight line perpendicular to the sun, and this velocity means that as we fall towards the sun, we keep missing it and actually fall around the sun gaining momentum as we fall towards it, and slowing down as we reach the furthest point in our elliptical orbit.
Imagine we are at the furthest point in our orbit (apoapsis) and just as we are about to begin accelerating back towards the sun. If we strapped massive rocket engines to the planet and sped up to a very great speed, we would break out of our current elliptical orbit and our new Apoapsis would be much further from the sun the next time we go around. As gravity is weaker the further we are from the sun, if we kept speeding will a point where we are travelling too fast and the sun will no longer be able to pull us back and we will become a rogue planet lost in interstellar space.

To understand orbits, Newton used an analogy of a cannon ball fired at different speeds.
Imagine you're on top of a very tall mountain on the moon(Our moon has no atmosphere so no friction). You shoot a cannon ball horizontally. The cannon ball will begin falls towards the moon as it is pulled down by the moon's gravity. The faster the cannon ball goes, when you shoot it, the further it will travel before it hits the surface unless you can shoot it fast enough that by the time it is pulled down to the surface, due to the curvature of the moon (the moon is round) it actually misses the ground. The ground has curved away underneath it, and it becomes an orbit. The lateral speed is greater than the gravitational force pulling it down, and it falls forever, always missing the surface.

A bit of scale is good.

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2013/08/earth-with-moon.jpg

Mentally draw a circle with the earth as the centre and you'll see that "closer the moon" still leaves an absolutely massive area for it to fly through.

Of course we will get hit again some day but too many people think the ISS is half way to the moon.

AnGaelach

Wheeliebin30 wrote: »

Sooner or later we will be hit by one.

Do us all a favour.

We're "hit" by some of them quite regularly, most of them just burnt up into the atmosphere on entry or land somewhere deserted in tiny fragments.

They do occasionally actually impact but we're relatively sparsely populated as a species. The Tunguska explosion being a notable one.

Gbear

I'll do some sums (please feel free to correct the **** out of them).

I'm assuming it's a sphere.
That gives 14,130,000,000 cm^3.
I'll use a density range from 1g/cm^3 (mostly rocky) to 8g/cm^3 (pure iron).
So that's 14,000-100,000 kg.

Assuming it's going at 100,000 km/h that'd give kinetic energy of 5,400-38,600Tj or about 1.25-9Mt TNT.

So if it stayed intact and retained all it's energy it'd have the energy of a low-medium yield hydrogen bomb and it'd level a city or small metropolian area. Or maybe cause a tsunami if it hit the sea (which it most likely would, what with it covering most of the planet).

Nothing that would destroy humanity anyway.

sbsquarepants

Syphonax wrote: »

Sure there is, havent you seen Asteroid vs Earth?

Is that an actual film?

kylith wrote: »

Chin up, it could carry a space plague that'd turn 50% of survivors into zombies!

With a bit of luck:)

seamus

Deleted User wrote: »

A bit of scale is good.

https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2013/08/earth-with-moon.jpg

Mentally draw a circle with the earth as the centre and you'll see that "closer the moon" still leaves an absolutely massive area for it to fly through.

Of course we will get hit again some day but too many people think the ISS is half way to the moon.

Seriously. It's like dropping a pebble out of an aircraft and worrying that it might hit another aircraft.

Composition of the object makes a huge difference also, and we don't appear to know what this.

Chelyabinsk was about the same size. So at worst this object might break a few windows and create a great light show.

That's if it came down near a populated area. The odds of which are incredibly small.

All those people having existential crises can relax. There was never any chance that this thing could kill you.