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Posted on 05/04/2019 7:42:52 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Despite a simulated eight years of preparation, scientists and engineers tried but failed to deflect the killer asteroid.
The exercise has become a regular event among the international community of "planetary defense" experts.
The latest edition began Monday near Washington, with the following alert: an asteroid roughly 100 to 300 meters (330 to 1,000 feet) in diameter had been spotted and according to rough calculations had a one percent chance of hitting the Earth on April 29, 2027.
Each day during the conference, some 200 astronomers, engineers and emergency response specialists received new information, made decisions and awaited further updates from the organizers of the game, designed by a NASA aerospace engineer.
As fictional months ticked by in the simulation, the probability of the giant space rock crashing into Earth rose to 10 percent—and then to 100 percent.
NASA launched a probe in 2021 to examine the threat up close. In December that year, astronomers confirmed it was headed straight to the Denver area and that the western US city would be destroyed.
The major space powers of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan decided to build six "kinetic impactors"—probes meant to hit the asteroid to change its trajectory.
It took time to build the impactors and wait for the right launch window. The impacts were set for August 2024.
Three impactors managed to hit the asteroid. The main body was deflected, but a smaller fragment broke off and continued on a deadly path, this time towards the eastern US.
Washington considered sending a nuclear bomb to deflect the 60-meter rock—repeating a successful strategy that saved Tokyo last year—but it was crippled by political disagreements.
All that remained was to prepare for impact.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Simulated women and minorities hardest hit...
$5 billion in improvements.
Is that a book or a movie. Looks interesting. Anytime I need a ride off this rock, I use my Electronic Thumb. And a towel. Always have a towel handy.
Just something I nicked in my travels... ;-)
Nothing ruins property values more than an impending asteroid strike, except muslimes moving into the neighborhood. Tbats worse.
Did you mean Deep Impact?
The line that indecisiveness prevented a second deflection attempt is equally absurd. It was demonstrated that the first deflection strike actually worked. How could anyone prevent another, especially when the new target is New York City?
You are not alone.......
AND..................that’s a BAD thing?
Gee, I was hoping it would be DC....
Oh jeez..yes. Sudden impact was on the other day. It was in my head. I got the names confused.
So in about 8 years there’s a 1% chance that an asteroid will hit earth. OK, but how do they come up with the idea it will hit a major city in the US such as Denver or NYC?
Have they calculated the exact trajectory of the object relative to what part of the earth will be in that path at that exact minute? (keeping in mind the earth is both rotating around the sun and spinning at the same time)
IMO this is climate change grade science at work creating fear. The so called scientists live in their big city democrat bubble and only worry about a rat infested metropolis. If they knew for fact it would hit Rapid City, SD they could care less about those people and worry about the dust fallout drifting towards rat cities.
Meteor gas been floating around YouTube, maybe some of the PTBS can watch it.
“most impacted”
heh, heh. Is that like “most squashed”?
If it was a simulation, then why couldn’t they tune a few parameters to assure 100% success? How do you program a simulation to predict failure?
I suppose they used Monte Carlo Simulation and ran a hundred thousand simulation runs with a fault tree and assigned probabilities.
The notion of us unintentionally breaking off a chunk of the asteroid which then hits the earth has been around a long time.
“Simulations don’t provide adequate training exercises.”
Absolutely. We need to run some carefully controlled experiments.
Women, children and minorities most impacted.
Hello, I’m from the DHS and I want to order
150 million doses of Exlax...
Groovy. :)
Celestial mechanics can do some pretty nifty computations.
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