Giant asteroid could hit Earth in 2014

sci0x

A giant asteroid is heading for Earth and could hit in 2014, U.S. astronomers have warned British space monitors.

GuanYin

so many variables I think the 1/909,000 odds are very very generous.

We don't have any dedicated monitoring system of tracking asteroid or meteor movement so chances are we could be hit any time by an cataclysmic impact without warning. The odds are, (excuse the pun) astronomica though.

On a cheery note, we have no nuclear weapons capable of travelling outside the earths gravity and we no longer have any rockets capable of reaching an incoming object (ala Armegeddon), nor do we have any means to build a rocket (the blueprints for ones we previously had were accidently destroyed in a NASA spring clean).

So if something does decide to amble this way, we are pretty much f*cked!

sci0x

Yeah the government have been refusing to fund a monitoring station for years.

mike65

....if I had a Euro for every "Asteroid to hit earth at some future point, possibly" story I'd be...slightly richer than I am now.

Mike.

Sarky

Thing is though, if you look at the average length of time between really big rocks hitting this planet, we're long overdue for something like this. It's rather depressing, really. Knowing my luck it'll probably strike just after I hear the words "Let's go to my room and-"

So we have a good 70-80 years to get ready then.

sci0x

Originally posted by mike65
....if I had a Euro for every "Asteroid to hit earth at some future point, possibly" story I'd be...slightly richer than I am now.

Mike.

You can't be very rich then. The last time it was said an asteroid would hit was a year ago. Before that was 10 years.

halenger

Originally posted by sci0x
The last time it was said an asteroid would hit was a year ago. Before that was 10 years.

Ah now that's not exactly true. It's whenever the media pick up on it!! There's been quite a number since the last BIG one in August/September last year but since the media made such a fuss about such a nothing then everyone paid very little attention and they made only a slight dent on a page orwebsite somewhere....

albertw

Or you can pick your doomsday date from http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrl1.htm

Theres only been 51 observations of this asteroid, so the orbit predicted is probably way off.

Cheers,
~Al

sci0x

Originally posted by halenger
Ah now that's not exactly true. It's whenever the media pick up on it!! There's been quite a number since the last BIG one in August/September last year but since the media made such a fuss about such a nothing then everyone paid very little attention and they made only a slight dent on a page orwebsite somewhere....

Ok, in the last 10 years only 3 of them had a chance of hitting earth. The rest only passed by earth.

sci0x

Originally posted by albertw
Theres only been 51 observations of this asteroid, so the orbit predicted is probably way off.

Cheers,
~Al

Well we can only observe it while we are in the correct rotation but yeah 51 is not very good.

Capt'n Midnight

if you have advance warning you could deflect it into orbit - would propbably require aero braking but it's a cheap way of getting raw materials in orbit

or crash it into the moon - and do lots of science stuff

sci0x

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
if you have advance warning you could deflect it into orbit - would propbably require aero braking but it's a cheap way of getting raw materials in orbit

or crash it into the moon - and do lots of science stuff

Crashing it into the moon is a very very very bad idea. Earth needs the moon. Without it we would not survive.

Sarky

Look at the moon's surface. Without it, we'd have been hit by everything the moon absorbed.

And that's apart from the contribution to tides, stabilising our own wobbly orbit, and giving people without a telescope something to look at...

mike65

Crashing an asteriod into the moon would'nt destroy it...












proberly! :eek: It would be shame to loose it. No more cheese...:(

Mike.

halenger

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
would propbably require aero braking

Wasn't Aero Braking in 2001's sequel 2010?

wolfman

Nobody seems to have mentioned that it was declared a false alarm after monitoring it on Monday night!

Heard it on the news yesterday

sci0x

Originally posted by wolfman
Nobody seems to have mentioned that it was declared a false alarm after monitoring it on Monday night!

Heard it on the news yesterday

Nobody mentioned it coz it isnt true. I heard it on the radio too yet BBC and CNN are still saying its real.

wolfman

ASTEROID 2003 QQ47 was first observed on Aug. 24, and based on limited data, experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimated as of early Tuesday that there was a tiny chance — 1 in 909,000 — that the space rock would smash into Earth on March 21, 2014.
Observations gathered on Monday night, however, allowed astronomers to plot the asteroid’s orbital course more precisely. By Tuesday evening, the risk for 2014 was eliminated. JPL said there was still a 1-in-2.2 million chance that an impact could occur sometime in the next century, but that is far below the “background risk” of a catastrophic collision in any given year.
“We have many asteroids that have residual risks,” Paul Chodas, a research scientist at JPL who specializes in calculating the orbits of near-Earth objects. “This particular one was of interest because it is fairly large, 1.3 kilometers [0.8 mile], and the predicted impact was only 10 years away. Combining those two factors, we raised it to some level of concern.”


Just got this now at this site

wolfman

Or this is Nasa's site concerning the probability of impact

sci0x

Yeah i saw that. But bbc are still saying its a risk and so are the british space agency. I dont know who to believe.

Im going to believe the british space agency, they do have hundreds of satellites watching space so i think they would know more.