Rising odds asteroid that briefly threatened Earth will hit moon
phys.org
phys.org
Any debris it can dislodge from the moon will be substantially smaller.
All is well!
> It is now believed to be 53 to 67 meters, roughly the height of a 15-story building.
Good thing we have so much confidence in our leadership and intergovernmental cooperative relationships!
(Subway was sued that the "foot longs" were only 11-11.5 inches in length: https://www.startribune.com/subway-to-ensure-footlongs-measu...)
For a couple of meters it works, I can imagine a 3 meter wide asteroid just fine.
But at 50 meters it becomes a distance unit for me and I can’t easily imagine an object with a 50m dimension. I’ve seen actual 15 story buildings though.
Seveneves was a fun book!
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
I loved them both.
But the moon has handled much bigger collisions without a single fatality!
Concerned about in a "it would suck to miss this scientific opportunity" sort of way though... We've gone to great expense to crash things into asteroids much farther away from earth so we can study the impacts... I have to imagine there are many scientists who would love to see a collision between the moon and a large asteroid through the right instruments.
Kidding aside, an argument can be made that life on Earth would never have had time to evolve if not for the Moon's protective effect against cataclysmic impacts.
> This is significant because it is bigger than the 50-meter threshold for activating planetary defense plans.
> If the asteroid still had a more than 1% chance of hitting Earth, "the development of one or more deflection missions would already be starting now", Moissl said.
Well, I hope they are right, because it appears we’re going to miss the opportunity to do anything about it if they are wrong.
(But this is almost certainly too small)
Mistakenly started this during Covid and decidedly the wrong vibe for that time period.
For starters, I would imagine it is at least 50% likely to hit the far side of the Moon, which we ~never see. Perhaps worse, because for it to hit the near side, it has to fly past the Earth somewhat, diminishing the odds.
But then, it also needs to be on the lit side. On the expected date of impact, 22nd Dec 2032, it will be 2 days after new moon, so not much lit area to aim for.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Isn't this completely divorced from the article title? Shouldn't it be "could hit moon"?