Posted on 11/24/2018 4:57:35 PM PST by BenLurkin
Tonight on CNN, two eminent astronomers debate:
Is it Trump’s fault the asteroids miss, or that they hit?
Bugs!
and given the damage it caused, and the energy released, I don't think I'd want to be under 20 miles from its point of detonation should it have come in at a steep angle. Note that "Tunguska" has been recently re-analyzed (the object's own momentum included in the explosion's effects) to be in the 3-5 megaton range...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
2009 WB105 is most likely considerably bigger than the impactor that created Meteor (Barringer) Crater in AZ. If it came in at a steep angle, a conservative estimate would be a resulting explosion of 40 megatons. If that is similarly directed as per the recent analysis of the Tunguska impactor... I think I'd want to be well over 50 miles away. If it makes it to the surface, I'm not sure how far fragments of Earth's crust might be tossed.
All that said, the likelihood of any human getting whacked by an asteroid is quite low. Then again, counting the really big ones, the risk may be greater than the risk of being killed by lightning.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-meteorite-death-india-probability-odds/
My 1st question is, how sure is NASA that one of these objects trajectory will not be altered slightly by a collision with some other object too small to readily detect, while the "near Earth object is several days away. That is, perhaps "it will pass by Earth safely" should be modified to "it will almost certainly pass by Earth safely".
My 2nd question is, why do so many of these close passages seem to occur on weekends? Is it a little joke by the Creator?
Do you have any idea why this crater is a lot closer to square than round?
The original surface wasn't completely flat -- almost as if we don't live on a flat Earth. So the parts that stuck up higher blew out differently.
Your article says the nearest one passed at approximately 238,100 miles, which to me means .99+ lunar distance.
Or do we measure lunar distance starting on the moon?
I didn't provide the .03 figure, that must have been a typo.
Which was the whole point of my reply number 8.
to number 8
Hard to believe we’ve survived the last ten years... no less the tens of thousands of years we’ve been dodging these bullets...
Democrats like to whip up hysteria...
Topics resulting from two searches (system only goes back about four years), "asteroid" and "asteroids":
Heh, irony, I love it.
some selections from the "greenland" search results:
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