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Asteroid 2004 MN4-Suspected to hit Earth (pg. 2)
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by TweeK
hehe Deep Impact??......good movie:D |
Armageddon...sheesh. :rolleyes: :stongue:
And I think I'm going to have to side with fr0st here. A single person is smart, but people in numbers always seems to equal tumult. Though *you* may not be the person who desires to go and rape and pillage...uh, how shall I say this? You get to be the person who bends over? :wtf: :haha: |
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| Absolut_Vodka |
| quote: | Originally posted by fr0st
Us, the peopl, would have no ing clue about it till it hits. |
Eh no... |
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| TweeK |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
Armageddon...sheesh. :rolleyes: :stongue:
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Nope Sounds like Deep Impact to me:p
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/di2.html
Bad: We send astronauts to land on The Comet to blow it up.
Good: This is a difficult subject. No one is really quite sure just what the best way would be to prevent a comet from impacting the Earth. One of the most important factors is time. If you have a long lead time, like say twenty years, then you would take a different approach then if you had a month or a year. In general a comet is a big lump of ice orbiting the Sun. If you give it a little nudge, it might only move a little bit, but that movement never stops; the comet gets more and more "off-course" as time goes on. Imagine it's originally aimed at Earth, and we give it a small nudge. If enough time can elapse between our nudge and the time it gets near the Earth, it may have moved enough from the original path to completely miss the Earth! So if you have enough time, even a small nudge can save you. The closer it is, the less time you have, and the larger a nudge you have to give it.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows (if you have help from Bad Reader Mati Meron, who is in no way responsible for any errors I might be making here!) that you need about 150 or so megatons to push the comet hard enough to have it miss the Earth entirely, given a year's warning (half that if it's two years) with the mass I find for Wolf-Beiderman. Unless I have made some large error in my math, it seems to me we need never send astronauts to The Comet at all; just set up a series of bombs to blow up near it and let Newton do the driving.
Blowing up The Comet is a different story. To start with, blowing it up might be a very bad thing to do. But if you really want to blow it up, you could. I have heard people suggest simply throwing rocks, literally, at an incoming comet, but that may not pack quite enough punch; a one ton rock slamming into a comet would only provide about one-ten-thousandth the energy of a one megaton bomb. The idea of getting bombs inside the comet is a good one; if you can disrupt the comet enough, perhaps jet effects will also drive it off course (or, given enough time, the expanding debris will get big enough that most of it misses the Earth). I have my doubts about actually being able to disrupt the comet, but I don't know enough about explosive yields and comet tensile strength to even guess if we can actually blow one up (there are some indications, however, that the comet that slammed into Jupiter in 1994 was only very loosely held together; it was likened to a pile of gravel). Anyway, there are ways to get bombs inside a comet without needing people there; for example, drill heads attached to the missiles, or very hard tipped bombs that would actually drive themselves into the surface upon impact (some probes to Mars are actually using something similar to this to sample the subsurface region). If we wanted to drill bombs under the surface, then I would be happier if we had some real live astronauts up there, capable of thinking their way out of a problem. They could be used as a sort of backup in case the machines themselves don't work.
So in DI my problem is manyfold: we don't want to blow up The Comet, we want to push it out of the way. We had the time (two years, as stated in the movie). And if we did want to blow it up, sending astronauts is a good idea as a backup in case of automation failure, not as a primary defense |
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| Alexan |
what about 2000? The Y2K bug and Nostradamus and all that sh**. People were just as scared, then nothing happened.
And yes if there's a meteor then they'll sned Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck up there and then Robert Duvall and some blonde chick with a big ass can hug in the middle of new york city. |
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| EriK_V |
| the earth is going to blow up tomorrow thread #59 |
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| verndogs |
| quote: | Originally posted by TweeK
Nope Sounds like Deep Impact to me:p
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No, Tweek you're wrong. That was Armageddon :stongue: |
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| TweeK |
| quote: | Originally posted by verndogs
No, Tweek you're wrong. That was Armageddon :stongue: |
Dam:p |
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| Ondrayce |
| Yeah. Deep Impact was the other ty asteroid movie with Elijah Wood. |
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| nrjizer |
No, you fools, this is not a hoax. This object was discovered and tracked by NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) program, who's sole task is to find and document possible earth hitting asteroids.
Btw, the odds of impact were recently upgraded from 1/233 to 1/62. Not entirely comforting odds.
We as a speces really need to get off our asses and figure out a good way to deflect these things. The nice thing about this particular rock is that we have a 24 year lead on it, which should be plenty of time to discover and implement a successful counter measure. Of course, 1/62 are good enough odds for most decision makers today... |
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| fr0st |
| quote: | Originally posted by nrjizer
No, you fools, this is not a hoax. This object was discovered and tracked by NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) program, who's sole task is to find and document possible earth hitting asteroids.
Btw, the odds of impact were recently upgraded from 1/233 to 1/62. Not entirely comforting odds.
We as a speces really need to get off our asses and figure out a good way to deflect these things. The nice thing about this particular rock is that we have a 24 year lead on it, which should be plenty of time to discover and implement a successful counter measure. Of course, 1/62 are good enough odds for most decision makers today... |
You also fail to point out the information that there is a 98% chance new data will rule out any possibility of impact in 2029. Instead you opt to be dramatic...... |
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| TOR |
| quote: | Originally posted by TweeK
Blowing up The Comet is a different story. To start with, blowing it up might be a very bad thing to do. But if you really want to blow it up, you could. I have heard people suggest simply throwing rocks, literally, at an incoming comet, but that may not pack quite enough punch; a one ton rock slamming into a comet would only provide about one-ten-thousandth the energy of a one megaton bomb. The idea of getting bombs inside the comet is a good one; if you can disrupt the comet enough, perhaps jet effects will also drive it off course (or, given enough time, the expanding debris will get big enough that most of it misses the Earth). I have my doubts about actually being able to disrupt the comet, but I don't know enough about explosive yields and comet tensile strength to even guess if we can actually blow one up (there are some indications, however, that the comet that slammed into Jupiter in 1994 was only very loosely held together; it was likened to a pile of gravel). Anyway, there are ways to get bombs inside a comet without needing people there; for example, drill heads attached to the missiles, or very hard tipped bombs that would actually drive themselves into the surface upon impact (some probes to Mars are actually using something similar to this to sample the subsurface region). If we wanted to drill bombs under the surface, then I would be happier if we had some real live astronauts up there, capable of thinking their way out of a problem. They could be used as a sort of backup in case the machines themselves don't work.
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blowing up an asteroid from the inside is not such a good idea, since you would need a huge amount of power to destroy it completely. it would probably just fragmentate, and then we'd have an army of bits and pieces coming our way.
experts have shown that the best way to save Earth from impact is to deflect the asteroid, to have a couple of nuclear missiles explode right next to it. that way it won't split up into small fragments and it will change its course by an inch or two. that's enough to avoid Earth, providing the astronomers detect the object in time of course. i don't know the exact numbers though, so i wouldn't know if this method will be helpful in this case. |
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| nrjizer |
| quote: | Originally posted by fr0st
You also fail to point out the information that there is a 98% chance new data will rule out any possibility of impact in 2029. Instead you opt to be dramatic...... |
No, I'm not trying to be dramatic.
I'm first pointing out that this is not a hoax, but an actual NASA tracked object, since some people in this thread seem to beleive that it's just another doomsayer making bull prophesies. Second, I'm simply stating the fact that the odds of impact were recently updated (by NASA) from 1/233 to 1/62. Yes, the odds are good that further observation would rule out any impact thread, but I'm merely correcting the current odds, as I saw them right on the front page of that Slashdot article.
And despite this rock, I still think we as a speces need to get a decent protection program going. |
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