Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday
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I've said this before. The way they find these things is looking for movement against the distant background / starfield. That works pretty well for finding things, but there is one problem. Any object on a collision course with earth will NOT be moving across the background in the days leading up to the collision. It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame.
Another way to model it is to think of firing a projectile from earth into deep space and see how that tracks against the background. That'd be the reverse scenario and there will be no relative motion until it's far enough to not get the same influence from the sun.
I dont think that is true aside from the case where the asteroid vector is the exact opposite of the earth.
Even if the earth and the asteroid are in the same accelerating reference plane, the background is not.
If you have two race cars going in around a track and at one from the other, it still appears to be moving relative to the stands.
Right. Now put the stands on another planet and you start to understand the problem.
We need to be able to see an asteroid at a minimum of of 3-4x the distance between the earth and the sun to have enough time to do anything about it based on the average speed of 40k mph.
Now keep in mind that at that distance you are looking for something as "tiny" as 60 miles across, the accepted size that would unquestionably end life on earth. Something ~1km across would cause mass famine. In 1908 an asteroid less than 200 feet across flattened 80 million trees over an 830 square mile area.
If you spin around in a circle, hold your hand out and look at it, it will be moving very quickly against a distant background, like the horizon.
My point is that the distance to the background helps detection, not hurts it. If the background was nearby and co-rotating around the Sun, detection would be a near impossible.
Next,
> We need to be able to see an asteroid at a minimum of of 3-4x the distance between the earth and the sun to have enough time to do anything about it based on the average speed of 40k mph.
Not really. The important variable is not distance, but rather the mass and velocity vector.
There could exist an asteroid that is currently barely 1 moon orbit away (~400 000 km), but has a velocity vector almost equal to that of Earth's. This asteroid could then be predicted to impact upon the next close encounter with Earth.
In general, the more distant the predicted impact date, the less the delta-v required to push the asteroid off its current path and avoid an impact in future.
> Now keep in mind that at that distance you are looking for something as "tiny" as 60 miles across
NASA and ESA have databases of some 35000 near-Earth asteroids, and many of them are orders of magnitude smaller than 100 km[1]. Our detection capability has significantly improved since efforts first started in the 1980s.
Asteroid impact avoidance is amongst the few natural disasters humanity has the technological, financial, and engineering capability to completely avoid.
We have both the firepower and the lift capability (if not now, then in the near future, dictated by the urgency of the asteroid impact) to deflect even a 12 km, Chicxulub-size impactor if detected sufficiently early. About 5-10 years' warning would be enough time for a large nuclear device to deflect such an asteroid, which would be a major achievement for humanity.
The asteroid in this article was detected 2 weeks ago.
As for detection there's some of them are coming from the other side of the sun, the one that Jupiter throw at us, It would be good to have a few more detection at L4, L3, It would be good to know what part of the earth is going to get hit. And evacuate them. Having a moon base off planet would be able to make all this coordination possible, because the amount of chaos that it would cause.So it needs a large gain antenna like the one that's in Australia that the Intuitive Machines lander low gain antenna was able to make two way contact with. The same one that was used to televise the Apollo missions.
I just can't, I can't emphasize enough the advantages to working and living on the moon. Shift all energy production all these experiments terraforming and such eco engineering To there just terraform one crater and start growing some plants . It shouldn't have been done so many years ago. It could be done with one pre-supply mission with a Falcon 9 and an Oberth Pumping orbit and then followed by a manned mission. Where the falcon heavy and dragon? The mayby recovered the second stage on the moon. It's just been over thought, overly planned. I mean, against nature, we're nothing. It's impractical to think that we can. can't stop a meteor. We're never going to see it coming. We don't have five years to plan that I mean. I'm even surprised that any of the simulations converge . You know, don't need to be adjusted. We don't even have gravity physics consensus.
I can't be done on a Earth because it becomes someone else's problem far away because it usually backfires diffuses through the air in the sea. It does not happen on the moon. So I mean, you can make this terrible meltdown reactor and then just leave. Leave it in a crater. Those gamma rays are not going anywhere except up. I just put a thing that says no fly zone over it.
Seems that we put a lot of effort and money into these overly ambitious projects like going to Mars, which has absolutely no practical advantage when leaving the moon up there, unused. I mean, this isn't about Space tourism t's about survival. making the moon an exporter. It has everything that we don't have, but that we're running out of, rare earth minerals. oxygen. The only thing that's missing is carbon dioxide. And we're going to be bringing that. And as soon as the plans we grow up there, using that 24/7 solar. solar power. and have a greenhouse. All we have to do is breathe the air they make. They can extract oxygen from the regular and we can do it too with heat. And we can sublimate iron and build stuff. We can, we can figure out how to sublimate titanium from titanium dioxide. I mean, the conditions are so ideal. We we would go there cause it because we think it's easy. When we go there because we thought it would be easy, right? But right now, I think we think is is going to be a lot harder than it really is. There's sweet spots on them. Lunar S pole that are just 20 degrees C. To send stuff back down to Earth, you just have to shoot it at 2400 kph The railgun. will fall back down to Earth will take long. Superconductor is in permanently shadowed craters are almost sort of Ambient temperature. if not already. Type B, type 2 or whatever.
Do we have a real plan for what we would do? What can we do? Do we even have nuclear weapons that can target outer space etc.?
Earth itself moves, so anything appearing static would be easy to spot since it's the background that also moves relative to an observer.
However your comment is not correct, everything moves, even in the days leading up to a potential impact things are constantly in motion. The only asteroids which appear stationary actually tend to be quite far away and just happen to be moving at just the right speed.
Things which are close to us, even impactors tend to have large angular velocities, very VERY few things come directly radially in. A part of this is that the Earth is rotating, if you are familiar with the parallax effect then the Earths rotation causes parallactic motion of the asteroids when close. IE, take a photo, wait 4 hours, and you, an observer on Earth, has now moved. The geometry has to be just right for close objects to be stationary, and a different observing position on Earth (or space) will see the object moving even if you see it stationary.
>> So simulating +20 million asteroids and what will be visible during the mission.
How many impacts do you simulate? These are the ones we care most about, and I still think they will be the hardest to detect.
looks like it would be coming from the sun's direction because it is kind of a. dominating force , but i wonder why a couple days after a flyby is when they are often detected. Is it just because the sun is able to light/heat it up more?
Also, I'm wondering what software you use to to do the modeling for one. And if it's open source. and if it's reversible , so you can back it up and fix positions when new datas comes in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Pasta%E2%80%93Ul... That was done at Los Alamos with a Maniac and the first version was fixed point, but as you can see it looks chaotic, but then there's a semi ring. There's a repetition. So I I'm guessing that's why that we care about are flybys. They go by once and at some point they'll come back.
https://www.josstam.com/reversible
This might help if you click the reversible to use fixed point. you can go back and and retrace.. the steps even with a rough integration.
I'm guessing there's such a cloud of objects you use something like. Fluid solver, even if you had to do that to some other body, then may have had an influence on the body that's under investigation, and you have new data for that, it might help to make the prediction more accurate. And without introducing any discontinuities in the model, if the past positions help determine the future ones going back.
You can see here (Stam) that even though it's chaotic like an N body problem, there is a semi ring and it repeats. So what appears to be maybe chaotic over time would be periodicity of the lineup. Then it seems, though, when certain planets are lined up. It's more likely that it's gonna have this this. confluence of Of gravitational influence. that will bring it in our direction. I'm thinking thinking Jupiter, Mars, the moon and the sun and the earth in between. Jupiter all the way to the earth is basically one orbit. At that velocity S50 kilometers uh second.
Also, I wonder if. the if something hit the back of the moon, would we even notice that until we go to the back of the moon or with a lunar reconnaissance or over and we find some craters that have direct impacts so that it would have could have been our planet killer. I'm sure there's quite a few up there with some some markings that will indicate that it probably injected some heavy metal right at that very crater. A direct hit. The moon was in the way because the the lineup of the two bodies ,that caused the dynamic in the first place. I'm guessing here.
Thanks again for making that chart.
Is that bad? According to NASA, "If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area. We believe anything larger than one to two kilometers (one kilometer is a little more than one-half mile) could have worldwide effects."
So... it would really suck if it hit a populated area, though that's unlikely.
> "This is a big object. An object of this size is going to have the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Brown said. "That'd be a regional impact. It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world."
So 260m would be absolutely devastating, but wouldn't end civilization as we know it. it would absolutely destroy any state or smaller country it hit. if it hit/exploded above an ocean, we'd have record breaking tsunamis completely flood whatever coastal areas it hit.
1: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/06/30/culture-re-view-...
It really depends. A ~100 m asteroid is roughly as energetic as some of the largest nuclear weapons ever detonated (~10¹ to 10² megatons).
As an example... It'd destroy London, and maybe some of its satellite cities like Luton, Oxford, and Cambridge, but the effects would be significantly diminished by the time the fireball radiation and the blast got to Nottingham.
> Fortunately, it won't impact Earth. But it would be a bad day if it did. "This is a big object. An object of this size is going to have the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Brown said. "That'd be a regional impact. It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world."
I wonder if it has since been updated to account for different disaster scenarios. It would be good to know, if you're storing 5 redundant copies of something critical, that all 5 copies won't be under 10 feet of water if an asteroid strikes one of the poles and melts all that pole's ice.
I can't imagine what data would be so critical that it's important to make sure it survives such an event, but that hasn't stopped googlers over-engineering internal things in the past.
>> Asteroid Day, sanctioned by the United Nations, was started in 2014 by astrophysicist and former Queen musician Brian May along with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart along with a few others. The goal is to inform the public about asteroids and their potential threats as well as calling on governments to work on asteroid detection programs.
If you look: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8...
You will see this was actually spotted back in 2014, but only seen for a few days. When an object is only observed for a few days we generally cannot compute an orbit for it, there is just not enough data to pin it down. However during this current pass of it (the last time it will come by for at least a few centuries), we have enough observations to pin its orbit down. Note that a lot of this is automated nowadays, with automatic observation and "interesting" objects being flagged automatically. There are a lot of small rocks up there (sub 100m).
I bring it up because of the Fictional mission commander talking to the president,
> Begging your pardon sir, but its a big ass sky.
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...
At this point, we're still at the point of needing years if not decades notice for us to even have a chance of actually protecting from an impact in a meaningful way.
Assuming the standard asteroid density of 2000 kg/m^3 [1], a 260 m diameter asteroid has a volume of 4/3 * pi * 130^3 = 1.84e10 m^3. Falcon Heavy can lift 16818 kg to a transfer orbit to Mars [2], which I assume is basically what it can do to reach an asteroid coming at us. A normal speed of space probes (without gravity assists) seems to be about 25,000 mph = 11600 m/s. Thus, it has a momentum of about 1.95e8 kg*m/s.
Assuming we hit the asteroid perpendicular to its motion, transferring all our momentum into transverse velocity, that is 1.95e8 / 1.84e10, or approximately 0.01 m/s. To ensure a miss, it would need to travel the whole diameter of the earth, 6.378e6 m, which would take 6.378e8 seconds, or about 20.2 years, which is the amount of time before impact we would need to hit the asteroid.
We would probably have more success hitting it head on. Since the earth is moving at about 3e4 m/s, we only need to delay the asteroid by 213 seconds. The minimum speed of an asteroid impacting Earth is 1.1e4 m/s, so we would need to move it backwards 2.343e6 m. This allows us to hit it slightly later, only 7.3 years ahead of time (in the best-case scenario). Assuming it could vary by a factor of two, we would need up to about a 14 year lead time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_cha...
https://www.llnl.gov/article/50716/new-nuclear-deflection-si...
A 5E15 J/Mt 1000kg bomb with a half momentum of about 10^9 kgkm/sec could deflect an angle of 0.1mrad 12 days out. Half energy conservation would gives you a similar ~0.01km/sec dV, so you'd need >10x more time or >10x more 1Mt nukes for a 3km asteroid. It gets much worse for larger asteroids, but interestingly dV doesn't change quickly with relative velocity since the required angle falls as the velocity rises.
If they knew it was going to hit, but not be an extinction event, maybe that makes some sense but realistically what kind of "prepping" can reasonably be done? Stock up on toilet paper?
If they knew it was going to hit and incinerate the surface of the earth, would they even say anything? Why create worldwide panic for no purpose?
Assuming 'they' knew it was a world-ending event... good luck getting everyone involved to not say anything to anyone, including their loved ones. I also imagine there are several agencies doing asteroid detection, so it's not like it's just NASA personnel we have to worry about.
the lunar base can provide terra firma form dropping supplies and there's startups in that. i even proposed to AIG insurance company a lunar escape resort as futures,funding miners via from invested premiums into managed derivatives and holdings.moon should be a net exporter or technology and rare earth.
i'm late to this discussion but i work on unified gravity, its close, we had it a long time but its getting to be beautiful & simple. verifiable so far. other possibility: A two burn oberth can zip a falcon heavy with high 50km/s towards a meteor if we saw it coming. this should be the 1000x higher priority over wars and genocides and pandemics and Gucci bags and mars fantasies and VR.
https://asteroidday.org/about/
(June 30th, since 2014)