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Yet another asteroid!
- Thread starter wirelessguru1
- Start date
More on the new huge asteroid!
An asteroid the size of a city block will pass by Earth this weekend, but have no fear: There's no danger of it hitting our planet.
The 80-meter (262 feet) wide asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth on Saturday afternoon in the United States. It will be about 975,000 kilometers (604,500 miles) away, said Don Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. That's about 2 1/2 times the distance from the Earth to the moon...
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/?hpt=hp_t3
So when they say yet again have no fear, there's no danger, etc, I do wonder if there is going to be yet another impact from smaller rocks orbiting around the bigger rock!?
An asteroid the size of a city block will pass by Earth this weekend, but have no fear: There's no danger of it hitting our planet.
The 80-meter (262 feet) wide asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth on Saturday afternoon in the United States. It will be about 975,000 kilometers (604,500 miles) away, said Don Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. That's about 2 1/2 times the distance from the Earth to the moon...
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/?hpt=hp_t3
So when they say yet again have no fear, there's no danger, etc, I do wonder if there is going to be yet another impact from smaller rocks orbiting around the bigger rock!?
..and now they are also saying that a comet could hit Mars next year!!!
Earth gets a rush of weekend asteroid visitors
Great article but the videos are really worth watching!
Great article but the videos are really worth watching!
I read this one article which makes a good point; are there more asteroids coming near us lately or are they always around but only we are getting better at spotting them?
It is a good point.
It is a good point.
wirelessguru1 said:
ya, and last week in the news they said they were looking for an old couple to send to Mars... wouldn't be ironic if they got there just on time to he hit by an asteroid....
seasidemike said:
Of course technology is always improving to detect cosmic stuff but BOTH asteroids and comet orbits are cyclical (periodic) so they are not around all of the time, but some months/years, there are a LOT more of them because of the timing of their orbits...so 2013 seems to be one of these years...
When they cay 'wake-up call' what exactly are we suppose to wake-up to?
There is nothing that could be done anyway.
I have been very interested in the enormity of space and just how small we actually are here on earth, maybe that is what we need to wake-up to as a human race and we should stop treating the earth and each other like we are something more that what we are.
There is nothing that could be done anyway.
I have been very interested in the enormity of space and just how small we actually are here on earth, maybe that is what we need to wake-up to as a human race and we should stop treating the earth and each other like we are something more that what we are.
The reality that we are painfully inadequate when it comes to handling the threat of an asteroid strike. I suppose that is what we are supposed to wake up to. Unfortunately, I imagine the only thing that will get the US to get serious about it is an asteroid strike hitting a major city and leveling it to the ground.
When you take the Solar System Chaos Theory into consideration, there is no way for astronomers to predict the threat of an asteroid strike:
Chaos theory isn't new to astronomers. Most have long known that the solar system does not run with the precision of a Swiss watch. Astronomers have uncovered certain kinds of instabilities that occur throughout the solar system -- in the motions of Saturn's moon Hyperion, in gaps in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in the orbits of the system's planets themselves. As used by astronomers, the word chaos denotes an abrupt change in some property of an object's orbit. An object behaving in a chaotic manner may, for example, have an orbital eccentricity that varies cyclically within certain limits for thousands or even millions of years, and then abruptly its pattern of variation changes. The result is a sharp break in the object's history -- its past behavior no longer says anything about its long-term future behavior. For centuries astronomers tried to compare the solar system to a gigantic clock around the sun. But they found that their equations never actually predicted the real planets' movement. This problem arises from two points, one theoretical, and the other, practical. The theoretical difficulty was summed up by the work of French mathematician Henri Poincare around the turn of this century. He demonstrated that while astronomers can easily predict how any two bodies -- Earth and the Moon, for example -- will travel around their common center of gravity, introducing a third gravitating body (such as another planet or the Sun) prevents a definitive analytical solution to the equations of motion. This makes the long-term evolution of the system impossible, in principle, to predict.
Chaos theory isn't new to astronomers. Most have long known that the solar system does not run with the precision of a Swiss watch. Astronomers have uncovered certain kinds of instabilities that occur throughout the solar system -- in the motions of Saturn's moon Hyperion, in gaps in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in the orbits of the system's planets themselves. As used by astronomers, the word chaos denotes an abrupt change in some property of an object's orbit. An object behaving in a chaotic manner may, for example, have an orbital eccentricity that varies cyclically within certain limits for thousands or even millions of years, and then abruptly its pattern of variation changes. The result is a sharp break in the object's history -- its past behavior no longer says anything about its long-term future behavior. For centuries astronomers tried to compare the solar system to a gigantic clock around the sun. But they found that their equations never actually predicted the real planets' movement. This problem arises from two points, one theoretical, and the other, practical. The theoretical difficulty was summed up by the work of French mathematician Henri Poincare around the turn of this century. He demonstrated that while astronomers can easily predict how any two bodies -- Earth and the Moon, for example -- will travel around their common center of gravity, introducing a third gravitating body (such as another planet or the Sun) prevents a definitive analytical solution to the equations of motion. This makes the long-term evolution of the system impossible, in principle, to predict.
