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Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

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Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#31

Post by pocketstar »

phkahler wrote: post #4

"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," 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…

This is an incredibly naive approach. All asteroids emit light in the infrared, to detect and track asteroids just takes an infrared telescope making apparent motion against any background completely irrelevant. NASA is working on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_Surveyor

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#32

Post by [deleted] »

phkahler wrote: post #4

"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," 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…

[deleted]

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#33

Post by ant6n »

SoftTalker wrote: post #26
dylan604 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if they announced on the day of the first observation, that's not really much notice to do anything about it other than start prepping for accepting of loss of life. I would seriously hope it took some amount of time for other people to verify/validate trajectory than the first person that observes it. At this point, we're still at the point of needing years if not decades notice for us to even have a chance…

> start prepping for accepting of loss of life 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?

If the asteroid was gonna be like a large nuclear explosion, perhaps one could evacuation the directly affected areas.

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#34

Post by [deleted] »

phkahler wrote: post #4

"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," 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…

[deleted]

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#35

Post by avar »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #23
biot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > "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."

Not very comfortable with how much that sounds like downplaying the effects. It would be the largest disaster in all of human history. For reference the estimated strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States is about 820 megatons and the largest US test detonation was 15 megatons so an impact of this size would be on par with or possibly worse than an all out nuclear war between the US and Russia. God knows what ki…

Nuclear weapons are targeted, an asteroid releasing 1000x the amount of energy of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't going to be 1000x worse. Perhaps it'll vaporize on impact in the middle of the Pacific.

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#36

Post by philsnow »

I recall that Google has a library that will answer the question, "given two identifiers like cluster names or machine names, which failure domains do they share?". Those failure domains can be like "they're in the same rack", "they share a power bus", "they're in the same physical building", "they're in the same geographical region", that kind of thing.

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.

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#37

Post by squarefoot »

phkahler wrote: post #4

"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," 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…

> Any object on a collision course with earth will NOT be moving across the background in the days leading up to the collision.

Earth itself moves, so anything appearing static would be easy to spot since it's the background that also moves relative to an observer.

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#38

Post by [deleted] »

foobarian wrote: post #19
jfoutz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For various reasons Armageddon is one of my favorite movies. Action/comedy, not exactly _good_ but I find it enjoyable. I bring it up because of the Fictional mission commander talking to the president, > Begging your pardon sir, but its a big ass sky.

The best thing about Armageddon for me are open flames in vacuum.

[deleted]

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#39

Post by pigscantfly »

philsnow wrote: post #36

I recall that Google has a library that will answer the question, "given two identifiers like cluster names or machine names, which failure domains do they share?". Those failure domains can be like "they're in the same rack", "they share a power bus", "they're in the same physical building", "they're in the same geographical region", that kind of thing. I wonder if it has since been updated to account for different…

The LOCKSS [1] digital preservation threat model (I've been told, there's a whitepaper if curious) considers nuclear first strikes and large solar storms -- they maintain a global network of servers for archiving and preserving academic research.

[1] https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss

Re: Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

#40

Post by tedunangst »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #25
rich_sasha wrote: post #14

My physics might be wrong, but with Earth's radius at 6500km and Lunar orbit radius around 350,000km, probability of a collision course given asteroid being within a lunar orbit distance is only (6.5/350)^2 or 0.03%, or maybe even cleaner, 1 in 3000. So it's not that close a miss.

Cool but what’s its orbital period and how does this close pass effect future crossings?

Presumably irrelevant since we didn't care about the previous crossing.
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