Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Given Torino 1 Rating

SpaceRef.com ^ | Sept 02, 2003 | NEO Information Center

[Young Werther]

A potential asteroid impact on 21 March 2014 has been given a Torino hazard rating of 1, defined as "an event meriting careful monitoring". The newly discovered 1.2 km wide asteroid, known to scientists as 2003 QQ47, has a mass of around 2 600 billion kg, and would deliver around 350 000 MT of energy in an impact with Earth.

[Young Werther]

It's high time that we get on our high horses and high tail it outta Dodge! Or we could borrow a page from Dr O'Neil's High Frontier and build a mass driver, land it on the asteroid and deflect its orbit. We could direct it to a LaGrange Point and mine it for the minerals or organics that it might contain AND it might give us reason to look starward rather than at each other in anger!

[BeerSwillr]

Back in 78 I had a Torino with a hazard rating of 1...

[Eala]

Is there some...? Excerpted - click for full question ^

[Valin]

Torino hazard rating of 1, defined as "an event meriting careful monitoring". The newly discovered 1.2 km wide asteroid, known to scientists as 2003 QQ47, has a mass of around 2 600 billion kg, and would deliver around 350 000 MT of energy in an impact with Earth.

This is IMO the understatment of the day.

[So Cal Rocket]

This Page
Last Updated
Mar 12, 2002

THE TORINO IMPACT HAZARD SCALE

Assessing Asteroid And Comet Impact Hazard Predictions In The 21st Century

• Near Earth Objects Scale Helps Risk Communication (NASA - July 22, 1999)
• Dealing With the Impact Hazard: An International Project (IAU - July 22, 1999)
• Torino Impact Scale Created To Assess Earth-Asteroid Close Appro aches (MIT - July 22, 1999)
• The Torino Scale (Ames Research Center - July 22, 1999)
• New Torino Scale Measures Asteroid Threat (explorezone.com - July 22, 1999)

Events Having No Likely Consequences (White Zone)	0	The likelihood of a collision is zero, or well below the chance that a random object of the same size will strike the Earth within the next few decades. This designation also applies to any small object that, in the event of a collision, is unlikely to reach the Earth's surface intact.
Events Meriting Careful Monitoring (Green Zone)	1	The chance of collision is extremely unlikely, about the same as a random object of the same size striking the Earth within the next few decades.
Events Meriting Concern (Yellow Zone)	2	A somewhat close, but not unusual encounter. Collision is very unlikely.
	3	A close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing localized destruction.
	4	A close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing regional devastation.
Threatening Events (Orange Zone)	5	A close encounter, with a significant threat of a collision capable of causing regional devastation.
	6	A close encounter, with a significant threat of a collision capable of causing a global catastrophe.
	7	A close encounter, with an extremely significant threat of a collision capable of causing a global catastrophe.
Certain Collisions (Red Zone)	8	A collision capable of causing localized destruction. Such events occur somewhere on Earth between once per 50 years and once per 1000 years.
	9	A collision capable of causing regional devastation. Such events occur between once per 1000 years and once per 100,000 years.
	10	A collision capable of causing a global climatic catastrophe. Such events occur once per 100,000 years, or less often.

---

Questions/Comments | Mailing List | Credits

Ron Baalke, Near-Earth Object Webmaster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, California

[RightWhale]

RightWhale favors capturing this asteroid for later use.

[Young Werther]

All in favor say aye!

Sad but today's Aviation Week has a series of articles about the Columbia accient. On the other had there was a good report about Burt Rutan's second drop test of SpaceShipOne. This flight included testing the "feathering" activiation of the tail plane which will slow down the vehicle during its descent. Everything went as predicted.

The video of this test will be played at the Society of Experimental Test Pilots in LA on Sept 25. A website is mentioned and maybe we can downlaod same video!

www.setp.org

[Polycarp]

Asteroid party at my house, starting 24 hours prior to impact. Bring your own hard hat.

[RightWhale]

There might be nothing to see until impact begins if the asteroid comes out of the daytime sky. Anybody have the orbit so we can figure out if there will be anything visible? A looming asteroid in the night sky would be awesome even if it skims by and misses, but a daytime transit would be a party dud.

[Domestic Church]

Pinging you to the asteroid party at Polycarp's house.

[Polycarp]

;-)

[StriperSniper]

Back in 78 I had a Torino with a hazard rating of 1...

I think my Goomba(that was his nickname) might have bought it, but it was his brothers driving that caused the hazard rating. ;-)

[Guillermo]

See what happens when we elect a GOP President and GOP Congress???

[blam]

"Pinging you to the asteroid party at Polycarp's house."

LOL. I'll be in the southern (underground) bunker, the one with four years worth of food.

Also, I saw one astronomer/astrophysist say that the best way to deflect these things is to place clouds of dust in their path.

[StriperSniper]

I'm not worrying until a dolphin thanks me for the fish, then I panic. ;-)

P.S. - The graphic FoxNews just showed at the top of the Fox Report, had France as ground zero! :-)

[blam]

Did Asteroids And Comets Change The Tides Of Civilisation

[Bars4Bill]

...we could borrow a page from Dr O'Neil's High Frontier and build a mass driver, land it on the asteroid and deflect its orbit. We could direct it to a LaGrange Point and mine it for the minerals or organics that it might contain...

We could nudge it toward Mecca at the height of party season.

[IncPen]

Starsky had a Torino rating of One.

[blam]

Moses’ Comet

Mike Baillie
Discovering Archeology, July/August 1999

Moses called down a host of calamities upon Egypt until the pharaoh finally freed the Israelites. Perhaps he had the help of a comet impact coupled with a volcano. A volcano destroyed the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea (between today's Greece and Turkey) around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Researchers Val LaMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck suggest the volcano might be associated with tree-ring evidence for several years of intense cold beginning in 1627 B.C. Could that form the basis for strange meteorological phenomena recorded in the biblical book of Exodus?

In the book of Exodus, which describes events a few hundred kilometers from Santorini, we read of a pillar of cloud and fire, a lingering darkness, and the parting of the Red Sea. An enormous column of ash must have hung in the sky over the eruption (the Israelites’ “pillar of cloud by day and fire by night?”), and the volcano doubtless caused a tsunami, or tidal wave (which could have drowned a pharaoh's army). The Exodus story is traditionally dated to either the thirteenth or fifteenth century B.C. Those dates, however, depend ultimately on identifying the “Pharaoh of the Oppression,” and historians have never proven to which ruler that infamous title referred. Many biblical scholars will disagree, but I suggest that a seventeenth-century B.C. date is not impossible.

The argument can be bolstered. Equally catastrophic meteorological conditions are recorded in the Bible for the time of King David. Psalm 18, in reference to David, speaks of terrifying events: “Earth shook and trembled. The foundations of the hills moved and were shaken. ... Smoke ... fire ... darkness ... dark waters ... thick clouds of the skies ... hailstones and coals of fire.” On some chronologies, David is placed 470 years after the Exodus. The spacing between the two disastrous events recorded in Irish tree rings at 1628 and 1159 B.C. is 469 years. The Exodus story includes dust, several days of darkness, hail, dead fish, undrinkable water, cattle killed by hail, water breaking out of rocks, the earth opening, the sea parting as in a tsunami, and so on. Someone looking at the Exodus story and knowing descriptions of other distant volcanic effects might offer the possibility that the Israelites escaped from Egypt under the cover of a major natural catastrophe. There may be veiled references to comets in the biblical narrative, leading to the possibility that the Santorini eruption itself may have been triggered by a bolide (comet or asteroid) impact. David Levy, co-discoverer of the comet that bears his and Jean Shoemaker's names, has argued that the description of the “angel of the Lord in the sky over Jerusalem with a drawn sword” (1 Chronicles 21) could be a reference to a comet. The Angel of the Lord was, of course, also present at the Exodus, as it was “traveling in front of Israel's army.” Further, there are indications that as the Israelites left Egypt, the night was as bright as midday. The nights over Europe were reported to have been daytime-bright after the only known modern bolide impact, the Tunguska explosion over Siberia in 1908.

These stories raise the question of whether comets recorded by the Chinese at the start and end of the Shang Dynasty, at very near the same dates, were the same as the comets that may be recorded in the Old Testament. I believe that we know the answer: In the last five millennia, several dynastic changes and dark ages have been the direct result of impacts and/or volcanoes. The consequences of such events must have been devastating, leading to apocalyptic imagery in religious writing and predictions of the end of the world. Zachariah of Mitylene lived through the environmental disaster that began about 540 A.D. In the mid-550s, he wrote in his twelve-volume records of the trials the world had survived: “In addition to all the fearful things described above, the earthquakes and famines and wars, ... there has also been fulfilled against us the curse of Moses in Deuteronomy."“ The curse included pestilence, consumption, fever, fiery blasts from the skies, mildew, a rain of powder and dust, and darkness. The curse of Moses must have seemed an appropriate description of life after the impact of a piece of a comet.

[Gringo1]

But the big question is what did Bush know about the asteroid and when did he know it.


And of course women and minorities to suffer most.