NASA: There is No Asteroid Threatening Earth

Megalith

Megalith

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Wait, there was supposed to be an asteroid hitting our planet next month? That can’t be true, as I’m sure I would have heard about a team of oil drillers being sent into space to detonate a nuke by now.

"There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In fact, NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years.
 
You mean all that money we spent to send oil well drillers up to nuke an asteroid was for nothing.
 
Even if there was something heading for Earth, do you REALLY think they'd tell us? Sweet Christ would chaos erupt all across the planet. As much as I would hate for them not to disclose such a thing, I don't blame them at all. People are stupid and can't handle such traumatic and life-ending news (myself included most likely).
 
tupz said:
Even if there was something heading for Earth, do you REALLY think they'd tell us? Sweet Christ would chaos erupt all across the planet. As much as I would hate for them not to disclose such a thing, I don't blame them at all. People are stupid and can't handle such traumatic and life-ending news (myself included most likely).
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I'm confused. Should I, or shouldn't I, start cracking open the heads of my neighbors to feast on the goo inside?!?! I need to know!!!!
 
YouTube astronomers would be able to detect an Asteroid heading towards up, heck, they're able to detect secret planets like planet X.:rolleyes:
 
tupz said:
Even if there was something heading for Earth, do you REALLY think they'd tell us? Sweet Christ would chaos erupt all across the planet. As much as I would hate for them not to disclose such a thing, I don't blame them at all. People are stupid and can't handle such traumatic and life-ending news (myself included most likely).
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And was an asteroid that would hit Earth within the month do you not think that there are amateur astronomers who could not see it? It would be fairly close, sure it might still be dark, but there are some amateur astronomers that have some seriously heavy duty hardware, not to mention every educational institution in the world with research grade equipment isn't controlled by NASA/US government.

One of my students actually asked me about this on the first day, I had never heard of the asteroid that is going to destroy humanity. And they also followed up with "do you think they'd tell us if it was going to happen" to which I simply replied "Who cares, if it's going to hit and whether we know or not isn't going to save you, so just relax and stop pretending that you could potentially do something"
 
OldandCrusty said:
I'm confused. Should I, or shouldn't I, start cracking open the heads of my neighbors to feast on the goo inside?!?! I need to know!!!!
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That mostly depends on whether or not you are a zombie.
Do you have an uncontrollable urge to eat your neighbors' brains?
The fact you asked about it rather than breaking down your neighbors door indicates to me you probably are not a zombie.
 
Kueller said:
That mostly depends on whether or not you are a zombie.
Do you have an uncontrollable urge to eat your neighbors' brains?
The fact you asked about it rather than breaking down your neighbors door indicates to me you probably are not a zombie.
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I am not a zombie..... I'm a Wendigo.

I just really like brains the most.
 
Wonder which has better odds, this or me finding a 6700K before then... Luckily they're saying it'll hit near Puerto Rico so if it happens to be true I'll be vaporized before having a chance to die all bitter because of Intel. :p
 
When they say everything's fine, don't panic. That's when you panic.

/tinfoilhat
 
We can't nuke the thing because gravity would pull the fallout back on us, right?
And a laser is too weak considering the size, correct?
So how about a nice railgun barrage - when we finally perfect them enough to propel projectiles above escape velocity and prepare enough of them?
 
So just to be sure the Russian meteor that damaged many buildings with its sonic boom 2 years ago, was accurately tracked and predicted by NASA? They were able to give the residents of Chelyabinsk some warning?

I just want to make sure that when NASA says nothing in the future will happen, that they at least have a track record of tracking one of the largest object to hit Earths atmosphere in the last 100 years.
 
Hasn't there been two big hits up by Russia? Science shows often quip that had the Tunguska strike of just over 100 years ago happened today, it would've disrupted various sorts of communications and electronics.

Dunno to what extent that's really accurate, and that was obviously pre-NASA... Just seems like NEO are a little more common than maybe we wanna admit. If an Asteroid is really coming it might put PR out of our misery, this drought is killing me! Water rationing sucks.
 
westrock2000 said:
So just to be sure the Russian meteor that damaged many buildings with its sonic boom 2 years ago, was accurately tracked and predicted by NASA? They were able to give the residents of Chelyabinsk some warning?

I just want to make sure that when NASA says nothing in the future will happen, that they at least have a track record of tracking one of the largest object to hit Earths atmosphere in the last 100 years.
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Just to be a bit anal, it wasn't a sonic boom, it was a shock wave - a fast and large pressure gradient.
But It's cool you brought that up. Good example.
We are helpless against relatively small (that one was 20 metres in diameter) objects approaching from an odd direction.
As much as I felt sorry for the Russians to suffer so many painful injuries and property damage, the dreaded 99942 Apophis rock is over ten times larger. If it hits a populated city - massive humanitarian crisis. If it hits the ocean - tsunami. If it hits a nuclear plant or chemical weapons stockpile - oh f***.
Let me repeat my question - do the advancements in creating more powerful railguns rises our chances of knocking an incoming meteoroid from collision course?
 
And another question that bugs me - for the physics buffs out there - would placing radiotelescopes on, say, Mars, decrease the error margin?
 
michalrz said:
Let me repeat my question - do the advancements in creating more powerful railguns rises our chances of knocking an incoming meteoroid from collision course?
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We can't even stop barges from drifting into things (rocks, ports, other boats). You want to stop something with considerably more mass and velocity? Ya right! :eek:

The ONLY thing that is a sure fire protection against random shit flying through the universe is to make sure that humans are in just as many random places in the universe.
 
westrock2000 said:
So just to be sure the Russian meteor that damaged many buildings with its sonic boom 2 years ago, was accurately tracked and predicted by NASA? They were able to give the residents of Chelyabinsk some warning?

I just want to make sure that when NASA says nothing in the future will happen, that they at least have a track record of tracking one of the largest object to hit Earths atmosphere in the last 100 years.
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Hey, NASA is supposed to be tracking these asteroids that could cause destruction and casualties on a massive scale. Here as an example of their incompetence is a meteor that they didn't predict that killed literally no one.
 
westrock2000 said:
We can't even stop barges from drifting into things (rocks, ports, other boats). You want to stop something with considerably more mass and velocity? Ya right! :eek:

The ONLY thing that is a sure fire protection against random shit flying through the universe is to make sure that humans are in just as many random places in the universe.
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Don't know about that example... I mean, sure, we could stop a barge, but the resulting negative acceleration would probably destroy it.

Now, a shotgun approach with a prolonged barrage of several railguns has at least some probability of shifting its course, no?
 
Pretty sure they're tracking anything that could make an impact, doubt they selectively narrow it down by where it might hit and whether it's bound for a critical zone as that can be a very fluid situation...
 
michalrz said:
Let me repeat my question - do the advancements in creating more powerful railguns rises our chances of knocking an incoming meteoroid from collision course?
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Lets do the math, and lets ignore the atmosphere so that our rail gun is at maximum strength. Current technology has a 3.2kg slug moving at 2400 meters/second. Lets up that 100kg slug at 10000 meters/second. So that the total energy of that slug .5 * 100kg * 10000m/s^2 or 5,000,000,000 joules. Now this is an astronomical leap in both speed and mass, way out of our range right now but for shits and giggles lets assume we got this.

The one that went over Russia was a bit over 12,000,000 kg and was traveling at nearly 20000 m/s. So the total energy of that would be .5 x 12,000,000kg x 20000m/s ^2 or 2,400,000,000,000,000 joules.

So this relatively tiny meteor would have nearly half a million times more energy than this hypothetical super rail gun. Now scale that up for an asteroid that could actually do some real damage and the line from the movie Armageddon is quite clear "That's like shooting a bb gun at a freight train"



michalrz said:
And another question that bugs me - for the physics buffs out there - would placing radiotelescopes on, say, Mars, decrease the error margin?
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Error margin of what? whether or not it would hit. Not really. Most of these predictions are based upon the long term orbits of these objects, now if we can get a lot of data to accurately calculate the orbit that's fine, but then as you move the clock forward you need to accurately account for the gravitational influence of everything that orbit goes near. Even if you only count planets & the Sun there is no closed form solution for a system with that many bodies, so it's all a numerical approximation, even if you get your delta-T down to tiny increments, adding those up over a period of 20 years or so is what gets you that 0.01% accuracy. Then take into account other unknowns, takes lots of processing power to deal with this, and then you need to process all the other objects too since their locations change. Being able to see it clearer won't help too much in the grand scheme of things.
 
Sincere thanks for the great explanation man!

This is GREAT as a reference for future pipe-dreaming :)
 
Oh well, here's hoping the celestial body we collide with is one of those diamond planets. At least we'll get some laughs at the irony in the end :D
 
NASA is losing credibility.

They lack the budget and the resources to make a claims like this. Even if they knew something was going to impact the earth what makes you think they will release that bit of information to the public. No sense in putting the world into chaos before the strike happens, when it certainly will be afterwards.
 
NASA should totally put this on the front of their website tomorrow morning with a caption of something like, "No asteroid will hit Earth next month! It's a Comet you primitive screw heads! LOL"
 
Frankie said:
Hey, NASA is supposed to be tracking these asteroids that could cause destruction and casualties on a massive scale. Here as an example of their incompetence is a meteor that they didn't predict that killed literally no one.
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They track all ranges of near earth objects. That object could have easily killed humans in a space station. Could have destroyed satellites.
 
I was outside today. While on a walk I saw something that inspired me.

I believe we have the technology.

Predict impact zones.

Buy rights to a bouncy castle design

Build/grow it using some gel foam crap
???
Die of something else later
 
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