Posted on 12/24/2010 12:01:47 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Astronomers have been busy trying to determine the spin period and composition of Venus' moon. On Dec. 8, 2010, results of the study were announced by JPL/Caltech scientists, led by Michael Hicks... It has the rather unfortunate name of 2002 VE68. That's because it was discovered on Nov. 11, 2002 by LONEOS, the Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Search. 2002 VE68 is an Earth orbit-crossing asteroid that has been designated a Potential Hazardous Asteroid by the Minor Planet Center... 2002 VE68 used to be a run of the mill, potential impact threat Near Earth Object (NEO). But approximately 7,000 years ago it had a close encounter with Earth that kicked it into a new orbit. It now occupies a place in orbit around the sun where at its closest it wanders inside the orbit of Mercury and at its furthest it reaches just outside the orbit of the Earth. It is now in a 1:1 orbital resonance with Venus... In the case of Venus and 2002 VE68, they both take the same time to orbit the sun once. They are in a 1:1 orbital resonance. So by definition, 2002 VE68 is considered a quasi-satellite of Venus.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Thanks, those are pretty cool.
-Futurama
These random chunks of debris are probably the source for all regional and global extinction events, imho. Rather than trying to attribute the large impacts (K-T, P-T, Manicougan, Reis, etc) to some nice orderly cyclical process involving crap from the so-far fictional Oort Cloud, the likelihood is that spirograph-like rendezvous as well as gravitational come-hithers by the Earth, maybe our Moon, and by the other inner planets, plus Jupiter, are the source of the impactors. Junk floating quietly along in orbits very similar to Earth’s can stay put for long periods, see-sawing around a bit, until the day they get a little too much stimulation. Then here they come.
:’)
If you go to http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2002%20VE68;orb=1;cov=1;log=0;cad=0#elem you can visualize its orbit. The Earth will “cross” its orbit on October 25 and November 25 this year. Its orbit currently passes well above (north) and below (south) of earth’s orbit. Unless (rather, until) perturbed, it should not be a threat. If you click the Horizons homepage above you get more precise ephemerides, but only for the period 1600-2200 AD.
Merry Christmas to you too!
Be afraid...
>> “This one could be a game ender for Earth....Hey... It could happen.” <<
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Show us your calcs...
The quasi-satellite has to ring the bell at Notre Dame every hour, so I’m not that worried.
Nah. It says, “stalked by a quasi-satellite,” not a “crazy sado-lite.”
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.LOL!
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:’D
How about not just a "close encounter" but one different from those it'd been experiencing for the last 100,000 years ~ when Earth tilted a little bit differently than it does now due to its quite extensive ice load.
On that latest close counter Earth didn't have all that ice and the mass of water was distributed far differently than those earlier periods.
Also, how close was the encounter? Is it possible this chunk came close enough to provide just enough tug to pull a Mediterranean bole over the Bosporus and cut a channel sufficient to maintain Black Sea contact with the Aegean?
And here's a big chunk of rock cruising through ~ kind of like to know if that sucker was VISIBLE too ~ and if VISIBLE did it have a fiery trail.
A really gigantic bolide would draw attention to itself ~ and get mentioned by Sumerians!
This be a night time visit as well, with the object approaching Earth slowly ~ finally passing by Earth along the Mediterranean Basin, and building up a bole of some serious note ~ maybe a few hundred feet ~ or maybe it was close enough to draw up a soliton and that could go up to a thousand feet. Whatever it did you could compute the energy taken to raise up enough water to crash across the Bosporus as well as to change this critter's orbit.
In later passings it'd be essentially invisible although remembered for a really, really long time.
You did know that the Sumerians report that God created Gilgamesh first, then Inkydu later, but he was an "hairy" man who ran wild with the animals, etc. An Earthgrazer, if it cruised through the atmosphere, would seem to have "hair".
Cruithne?
What kind of sci-fi geek name is that? It’s like Cthulu only different. When you let the geeks do the naming, you inevitably get Klingon sounding crap like “Cruithne”.
On the other hand, they’re the ones who spend hours and days and months searching for these things, so there is justice in letting them name them.
So, I guess Cruithne it is.
The Sumerians were busy inventing writing 5,000 years ago, but they were by that time already well practiced at ACCOUNTING.
If there are anomalies in the tables, the fact the information came from 5000 years go rather than 3700 years ago may be a clue to determining whether they were watching Venus or a chunk of rock.
if this hunk is Inkydu, we're really in the grove, eh!
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