Posted by Dee Norris
A recently discovered Apollo Asteroid, 2008 TC3, exploded over Sudan at about 1046 EDT on October 7, 2008.
2008 TC3 was discovered on Monday by an observer at the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. 2008 TC3 is notable in that it is the first Asteroid of its size that was identified before impact and tracking it put the entire Spaceguard tracking system to an extreme test.
TC3 is estimated to be only two to five meters in diameter but exploded with the force of a one kiloton nuclear device. Asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few months according JPL scientists.
No deaths have been reported yet.
The important lesson here is that Spaceguard is able to identify and track these smaller objects as well as the larger ones. A 20 to 50 meter asteroid exploding over a major city could result in a significant loss of property and life. The most imagined dire consequences of AGW could never stack up to the actual consequences of a larger asteroid actually impacting nearly anywhere on the Earth. If for this reason alone, funding for space exploration needs to be continued.
More at:
UPDATE1: Please note that the use of an alarmist headline and imagery to increase the casual reader’s desire to look at the entire article was an intentional parody. – Dee
UPDATE2: See this article on whats happening in the world of astronomy due to this event. – Anthony
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Wow, if a small meteor has that kind of impact I can’t image what a 75 meter one would do. Thanks for the report.
Isn’t amazing that one of these asteroids can hit the earth every few months and no-one has died!
Given the constant claims that the world is teeming with fecund and destructive humans, I thought anything falling from the sky could not help but hit one of us. Is it truly possible that there are areas of the world that are wilderness and have not been despoiled by our kind?
The Americans sent Sky Lab Australia’s way about 20 years ago but missed hitting anyone only because we were too quick for them and evacuated the Outback just in time. Phew!
…
Let’s not add this to the list of things we have to panic about just yet.
More at:
JPL Small-Body Database Browser
Good that JPL knows how to calculate positions of solar system bodies [no barycenter nonsense].
Sounds like a story right out of sience fiction. The image is anyway…
http://www.sciencefiction.dk/udgivelser/proxima/proxima-nr-87.html
Given that the asteroid disintegrated on its way through the atmosphere and did not actually reach the ground in Sudan, it is a bit misleading to state that Sudan was hit. And the lack of fatalities from such regular occurrences becomes less surprising, when we know that objects of this size burn up before they impact anything other than air.
“The most imagined dire consequences of AGW could never stack up to the actual consequences of a larger asteroid actually impacting nearly anywhere on the Earth.”
90% of the creatures on Earth at the end of the Permian might disagree with you but you are right about increasing funding for space research. This is the first asteroid of this size to be identified before impacting the atmosphere, but it was only discovered on the 6th October, one day before impact.
H (23:29:13) :
“Isn’t amazing that one of these asteroids can hit the earth every few months and no-one has died!”
Not really, asteroids of this size fragment and burn up in the atmosphere, anything that hits the earths surface is very small and extremely unlikely to hit anyone! It’s the larger Tunguska size events that could cause concern (estimated once every 100 years or so. The Tunguska event was in 1908!).
“No one noticed the rock.”
One rock can ruin your whole day.
One of my biggest problems with the AGW frenzy is that the proposed “solutions” impair our ability to deal with other threats.
Read ‘The Three Big Bangs’ by Philip Dauber & Richard A Muller – then you’ll chew your nails!
The Wikipeida entry states it burned up without touching the ground. So no impact. The ground path of the this meteorite shown in the same Wikipedia report completely contradicts the imagery for this post as well, since it was a glancing trajectory.
Such a trajectory would have produced elongate craters, similar to the Carolina Bays, but certainly not a circular one normally assumed to be the result of meteor impact.
Mary Hinge:
That the P/T extinction was caused by a runaway hothouse is very far from certain. It seems unlikely, but not impossible, that it was caused by a large asteroid or cometary impact. There are points for and against both theories. Read for example: Erwin, D. H. (2006). Extinction, for an up-to-date review.
Incidentally, not all impactors of this size fragments (“explodes”) in the atmosphere. Nickel-irons survive down to the surface, fortunately they are a minority.
I once saw one of these mothers skimming the upper atmosphere before leaving for parts unknown. It was after long sunset and spectacular.
Ain’t nature fun.
There appear to have been a few of these small-to-medium impacts over the last 100 years or so, fortunately over wilderness areas, including:
1863: Wabar desert, Saudi Arabia: (could have been 1891, there’s some confusion.)
1908: Tunguska.
1930: Brazil.
1947: Sikhote-Alin Mountains, Russia.
I’m wondering whether there have been plenty of others during this time, but falling into the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from anywhere, thus not being recorded. Any bets?
Hit? Hit what, the atmosphere?
What will that do for the October MSU data? (tongue in cheek)
Speaking of climate and in-bound asteroids, evidence is increasing that Younger Dras was triggered by an comet that exploded over Canada. This from July 2008 –
Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened By New Evidence Located In Ohio, Indiana
(Posting this is not necessary)
Couple of things…
Please add a caption for the image that mentions it was only added for illustration and is not accurate. I get it, but others may not. No need to hurt your reputation.
Second, the image is hot-linked from another site which uses their bandwidth and is considered a faux pas at a minimum, but many consider it theft since they have to pay for bandwidth.
Love reading your blog, but wanted to mention some constructive criticism.
Reply – Good points. Thanks! – Dee Norris
@Mary Hinge:
“Every Global Disaster is caused by Climate Change” seems to be the mantra lately.
The cause for the Permian–Triassic extinction event is still up for grabs, but it is more then likely that climate change would have been a consequence of the cause of the event, not the cause itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_event
Incidentally, not all impactors of this size fragments (”explodes”) in the atmosphere. Nickel-irons survive down to the surface, fortunately they are a minority.
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Even if it did survive it’s passage through the atmosphere, the meteorite would have been slowed and been reduced in size tremdously.
I doubt it would have had enough energy left to make a big crater.
IE, unless the puppy hit you in the head, you wouldn’t have muct to worry about.
I once saw one of these mothers skimming the upper atmosphere before leaving for parts unknown. It was after long sunset and spectacular.
Ain’t nature fun.
—————-
How do you tell the difference between an asteroid that skimmed the atmosphere vs. one that plunged into the atmosphere and burned up?
Or for that matter, an asteroid that entered the atmospher but then was slowed sufficiently that it stopped creating the characteristic trail of fire.
Mary Hinge, Dee Norris,
I thought the latest scientific suggestion was that the dinosaurs were already on their way out due to climatic/environmental changes, & that the Big One merely finished the job off! Presumably it was all that dino CO2/CH4 pumped into the atmosphere or something.
OT – I see the Royal Society is claiming many deaths as a result of Ozone increases & must be tackled urgently. Any clues as to what this particular scare storey could be actually about or could it be that C02 is now so passé?
Dee Norris (05:17:57) :
“Every Global Disaster is caused by Climate Change” but none by man.
Climate changing events of the past:
Creation of Universe
Supernova producing solar system
Whatever caused Permian extinction
Yellowstone Super Volcano
Chicxulub event
Yet, somehow things eventually settled down. Without a single carbon credit being traded.
@Alan
The dinosaur die off was the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event. There have been many major and minor extinction events in the history of life
There is no such thing as a “one kiloton nuclear device”. The atomic bombs invented in 1945 were in the range of 25 to 35 kilotons of TNT. Those were SMALL nuclear devices. The largest thermonuclear devices of the 1960’s were in the range of 40,000 kilotons of TNT.
Reply – The M54 warhead was a sub-kiloton fission device developed at the end of the 1950s and deployed until 1971. – Dee Norris
Pedantry alert.
It appears the object was a meteoroid, not an asteroid. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid :
So, let’s include that as part of the parody value of the headline.
There is 99% probability that LA and Tokyo will be hit by catastrophic earthquakes during the next 100 years.
There is a 100% probability that the next administration will waste massive amounts of taxpayer money in the fruitless and pointless pursuit of reducing CO2 emissions.
C’est la vie.
Why does the need persist to define energetic events in terms of “x-ton nuclear device?” I am fine with multiples of “Hiroshima events” or similar descriptions, those are recognizable in scale. But “x-ton” explicitly refers to TNT equivalents. Adding “nuclear” to the measure is just pure sensationalism, since nuclear events are defined in equivalent tons of TNT.
This is the same sort of linguistic breathlessness that is used by the AGW and other envirohysterics.
Reply – Of course you are quite right. I was tempted to add the sentence. “Scientists don’t expect any effects due to radiation from the explosion.” Technically correct and totally alarmist! – Dee Norris