Oh, and we will not be able to "divert it", as obama is flushing NASA...remember? But the muslims will all die with a lot of self-esteem.
Posted on 07/28/2010 12:18:12 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
A massive asteroid might crash into Earth in the year 2182, scientists have warned.
The asteroid, called 1999 RQ36, has a 1-in-1,000 chance of actually hitting the Earth at some point before the year 2200, but is most likely to hit us on 24th September 2182.
It was first discovered in 1999 and is more than 1,800 feet across. If an asteroid of this size hit the Earth it would cause widespread devastation and possible mass extinction.
And scientists say that any attempt to try and divert the asteroid will have to take place more than 100 years before it is due to hit to have any chance of success.
If the asteroid had not been spotted until after 2080 it would be impossible to divert it from its target, they warned in a new research paper.
While the odds may seem long, they are far shorter than that of the asteroid Apophis, which currently has a 1 in 250,000 chance of striking Earth in 2036.
A competition was launched in 2008 by the Planetary Society for designs for a space probe to land on Apophis and monitor its progress.
Maria Eugenia Sansaturio and scientists from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain have used mathematical models to calculate the risk of the asteroid hitting the Earth anytime between now and the year 2200.
And they were shocked to discover that there are two potential opportunities for the asteroid to hit Earth in the year 2182.
‘The total impact probability of asteroid '(101955) 1999 RQ36' can be estimated in 0.00092 –approximately one-in-a-thousand chance-, but what is most surprising is that over half of this chance (0.00054) corresponds to 2182,’ Sansaturio said.
The asteroid is now behind the Sun and will next be observable only in the spring of 2011.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Interesting. I can foresee a possibility that by (say) 2150, the race to control that asteroid, and therefore to make it either miss entirely or to hit any given spot on earth - might be THE most important struggle of the day.
I doubt that an 1800 foot long asteroid would do that much damage.
Sure, it would probably take out a city if it hit one, but mass extinctions? I don’t think so.
The one that hit in the Gulf of Mexico just off of the Yucatan 65 million years ago was about the size of Manhattan. While it is given the credit for mass extinctions, even it did not kill everything.
I find that the meteor monitoring community generally refrains from alarmism. Once we have a few more measurements on it, we may be able to eliminate it as threat. What generally happens is that the initial coarse orbit, based on a few days or weeks of observation allows researchers to back propogate to find past observations that were not noticed at the time. (Happens all the time, the original researcher wasn’t looking for asteriods, but the digitized images are catalogued and stored.) Often a threat can be downgraded or eliminated without any further observations. The odds are that when this object emerges from behind the sun, the longer time baseline will allow enough resolution to eliminate it as a threat immediately. If not a few more years of observations may decide the issue one way or the other.
I’d prefer a bunch of small asteroids hitting earth in the very near future. ...at select locations. (Mecca, for starters).
Did I mention that I sell meteor insurance?
There is no way to prove it (that I know of) but a land hit on the american continent is almost sure to trigger the San Andreas, which will triger the Pacific Ring of Fire, most probably generating an Asian earthquake. It’s not a pretty picture. It could also knock the earth off its axis (remember the recent Chilean earthquake 33 miles underground shifted the earth’s axis by 3 inches). Up that substantially (admittedly very substantially) and that will be all she wrote. The sonic booms on the way in would also probably trigger earthquakes and flatten most structures.
That might be the only way to get 0-bama out of office.
I guess you never wondered why you’ve never run into a 65 million year old guy before? LOL
Perhaps someone has beat us to it.
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!
In less than 150 years, every man, woman and child now living on Earth will be dead!
Clearly, it is Bush’s fault. Women and minorities will be hardest hit.
Unfortunately not. NASA is too involved with making muzzies feel good to concern themselves with a real mission.
Ooh you just reminded me. A tangential blow from an asteroid is usually much worse than a solid impact. Much more of the energy remains in the top mile of water/air.
Far more effective at creating tidal waves, and doubtless also for triggering the ring of fire in your analogy.
But a 90 degree hit to... oh crud ... YELLOWSTONE. That would be a real day at the beach.
Yeah OK, a land impact in at least one place could certainly end all life in North America. Ugh!
It's called kinetic energy, the energy of a moving mass.
Mathematically it's mass times the velocity squared over two.
Granite weighs about 169 pounds per cubic foot. An 1800 foot diameter sphere contains 3,053,628,059 cubic feet. So the asteroid's weight would be 169 X 3,053,628,059 pounds. Dividing by 32.2 gives us the mass: 1.602681 X 10^10 slugs (mass in the English system).
The speed at impact is estimated to be 42192 feet per second. Squared it's 1,780,164,864. Divided by two it's 890,082,432.
So, multiplying, it's 1.602681 X 10^10 times 8.90082432 X 10^8, or 1.4265 X 10^19 foot pounds.
That equals 4623 megatons of TNT. You saw what 10 kilotons did to Hiroshima. The explosion from the asteroid hitting would be 462,300 times more powerful.
“Batery powered rockets”
Don’t be silly, clearly the will send up solar rockets at night
ML/NJ
Golly Gee, I better prepare...
The eruption of Mount St. Helens was estimated to be 24 megatons, so we're talking the equivalent of 193 simultaneous Mount St. Helens eruptions.
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