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Two asteroids to pass near Earth Wednesday

Brent

Brent

Admiral
Admiral
http://space.flatoday.net/2010/09/two-asteroids-to-pass-near-earth.html

Call Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck or MacGyver or Jack O'Neill !

Two asteroids are expected to pass within 154,000 miles of Earth on Wednesday _ closer than the distance between the Earth and the moon, NASA announced.

Neither will hit the planet, NASA was quick to add.

The center's personnel concluded both objects would pass within the distance of the moon to Earth, approximately 240,000 miles.

The asteroids should be visible with moderate-sized amateur telescopes.
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It is crazy how late in the game we detect these things... This past Sunday, only 3 days ago, these were detected... Who knows what else is out there headed our way....

I propose they build special asteroid tracking satellites and put them in orbit around Earth, the Moon and Mars, create a sort of web or net of trackable space that will sense motion within the visible field.
 
One of these days we are gonna get hit and not even know it! :eek:

:lol:
 
Not really a big deal... that size would most likely break apart before they even hit the surface, so in the cosmic scale, it's nothing, human scale it's.... meh.
 
Nothing to worry about. The International Astronomical Union has classified these as "Dwarf Asteroids."
 
RJDiogenes said:
Nothing to worry about. The International Astronomical Union has classified these as "Dwarf Asteroids."
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They prefer to be called "Little People Asteroids" and to swipe the second joke in the same sentence, yes, there's a cream for that.
 
Yeah, that's not very big. If they were to hit us, how much would even survive entry through the atmosphere?
 
The author or the article put the focus in the wrong place.

A different article makes it clearer why this is newsworthy: Not because there are tiny asteroids brushing by us, but because we were able to detect them three days early. That's a remarkable achievement.
 
^ True. It's like spotting something the size of a house or maybe a city bus while it's still a million or more kilometers out.

Brent said:
I propose they build special asteroid tracking satellites and put them in orbit around Earth, the Moon and Mars, create a sort of web or net of trackable space that will sense motion within the visible field.
Click to expand...
Well, there aren't any dedicated asteroid-tracking satellites orbiting the Moon or Mars, of course, but that doesn't mean that a fair amount of effort isn't being made to identify, chart and track asteroid movement. Obviously, the larger they are, the easier they are to spot.

Here's a video which helps illustrate how that's going:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw[/yt]

It begins by showing the number of inner-solar system asteroids which were known in 1980 and--over the course of an animation composed of more than 11,000 separate images--brings us up to how many are known today. The green points, we don't need to worry much about. The yellow points represent asteroids which periodically pass near Earth's orbit but do not cross it; we don't need to worry a lot about them, either. The red ones--the ones which do cross Earth orbit--are the ones we want to be concerned about.

Be sure also to look at the description which accompanies the video here.)
 
More about the current pair of passing asteroids here:

Most of you have probably heard by now of two small asteroids, both in the neighborhood of 10 meters in diameter, recently discovered on trajectories that pass unusually close to Earth. They were discovered on September 5 by the Catalina Sky Survey, and have since been observed by numerous amateur and professional astronomers. Neither poses any risk to Earth; even if they were on collision courses, which they are not, they would be too small to do much more than spatter a few rocks onto the ground. It'd be a bad day for you if you were underneath that, but these rocks wouldn't do any collateral damage outside their physical impact zone.
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But the same article also tells us that we may not have seen the last of these guys:

Interestingly, a quick look at JPL's "Impact Risk" website indicates that, with our current knowledge of their orbits, both of these bodies do have nonzero future impact probabilities. Right now RX30 is showing up as a roughly 1-in-a-million impact chance between 2063 and 2066, while RF12 actually has a pretty high impact probability of about 1 in a hundred between 2095 and 2110. However, again, because of their small size, these things pose no real hazard even if they do land on us.
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As someone, somewhere once said, "Stay tune!"


(That JPL "Impact Risk" site may be worth a look, too, for anyone worried that not enough attention is being paid to possible sources of Burning Death from the Sky™.)
 
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