Asteroid to Threaten Earth in 2013

It's going to pass17,000 miles from us. While that's actually inside the sphere of satallites in geosynchronous orbit, it's still pretty far away. Astronomically, this is like a knife dropping out of the sky and sticking in the ground between two toes. Practically though, it's going to miss by a wide margin. Nothing to be afraid of here.
 
hopefully it hits the moon instead, there is a reason why the moon if full of holes, cause of a bunch of rocks hits the moon first before us, some planets surrounding Earth is there for protection. But since the Universe is so large and wide open, anything could hit earth, just create a armegeddon machine like the movie ;)
 
If the entire asteroid is to crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia.
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That's a fair chunk of Britain if it landed there...well as long as it takes out a chav city I won't have a problem with that.
 
drako said:
I'm not surprised that there are many non-detections. Funding for asteroid detection is pretty pitiful.
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It's inherently difficult. Think about it. They don't give off light but only reflect it and the ones that we can see are generally very very massive and are capable of cataclysmic events, these smaller and mid-sized asteroids are not just too damn small, they're also practically invisible :eek:
 
As Billy Bob said, Nasa has funding to monitor 1% of the sky, and frankly it's a big-ass sky.
 
zomby said:
hopefully it hits the moon instead, there is a reason why the moon if full of holes, cause of a bunch of rocks hits the moon first before us, some planets surrounding Earth is there for protection. But since the Universe is so large and wide open, anything could hit earth, just create a armegeddon machine like the movie ;)
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Uhhh, no. The reason the Moon is full of craters is that there are no atmospheric processes to erode them away. Without water and atmosphere, Earth would look just like the Moon.
 
I wonder how much bang a few nuclear explosions would produce? With such a large stockpile between the US and Russia and so many of them in ICBMs that could probably be adapted to a space deployment?
 
night_2004 said:
I wonder how much bang a few nuclear explosions would produce? With such a large stockpile between the US and Russia and so many of them in ICBMs that could probably be adapted to a space deployment?
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ICBM delivery vehicles like the Titan, Minuteman and Russian SS series missiles do not have the fuel capacity to achieve orbit much less strike something out in deep space. (which is where you'd have to strike to have any meaningful effect on altering the trajectory enough) Nuking it closer to Earth causes a whole other set of problems without really solving anything. If you succeed in breaking the thing apart, largely the same amount of mass is still going to impart the same amount of kinetic energy, most of which is going to be converted to heat. Just now you have that fireball over a larger area.
 
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