From NASA’s Spaceweather.com and NASA JPL Twitter feed. It only takes one missed space rock to ruin your day.
On Friday November 6th at 2132 UT (16:32/ 4:32PM EST) asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet’s surface. For comparison, Earth’s diameter is 12,756.1 km. That near miss was well inside the “Clarke Belt” of geosynchronous satellites.(35,786 km/22,236 mi)
Friday’s (Nov 6) flyby of asteroid 2009 VA is the third closest on record. (That we know about.)
If it had hit, the ~6-meter wide space rock would have disintegrated in the atmosphere as a spectacular fireball, causing no significant damage to the ground. But the fact that there was so little warning is troubling.
2009 VA was discovered just 15 hours before closest approach by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey.
While millions worry about CO2, there seems to be little worry nor action about this list:
It is a threat we can actually develop technology for to do something about.
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Why are they so confident it would have burned up in the atmosphere? It depends on what it is made of. This one did not instantly evaporate:
And neither did that famous office-block sized chunk that skimmed across the mid-US in the 1970s. Still trying to find a Youtube clip of that one – it was quite a sight, travelling from horizon to horizon.
What the environmentalists don’t understand is that the Earth needs humanity to save it. We all now the dangers of space travel and as the earth travels in space, it is bound to get hit hard. Even the sun will go poof some day. Only with the advancement of science and the creation of a technologically advanced society the Earth can be saved. Who know, we could even be able to control the sun some day or even move the earth in a safer orbit when it expands or whatever. If we are reduced to live for ever in the middle ages, the Earth and the Environment has no chance to survive, no chance at all.
Maybe we were put here to save the Earth from the harsh cosmic environment by becoming a technologically advanced society.
A good one, Ray. Refreshing thinking. I´m with you. Thank you.
“asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet’s surface. For comparison, Earth’s diameter is 12,756.1 km. That near miss was well inside the “Clarke Belt” of geosynchronous satellites.(23,000 km)”
If you look closely at the photo, you can see Comsat 123 plastered on the surface.
All kidding aside, a small asteroid or comet fragment impact is an event likely to occur within the period of a century (think Tunguska). Why the panic to spend billions in a futile tilt at the AGW windmill while NEO survey telescopes costing low 10s of millions could help us better assess the impact risk? Ah yes, nobody gets rich over the telescopes (Al Gore Kliner Perkins) and no govt rakes in hundreds of billions in tax revenues with the telescopes. My bad.
This is the stuff of movies. I was in two of them. While an asteroid can be a civilization ender, so can stewing in a pot of CO2 driven heat. You would think a weather man could grasp this, but politics can be a slatewiper.
>>marky48 (10:57:15) :
This is the stuff of movies. I was in two of them. While an asteroid can be a civilization ender, so can stewing in a pot of CO2 driven heat. You would think a weather man could grasp this, but politics can be a slatewiper.<<
Even worse would be broiling in the hot air coming from the mouths of politically-biased scientists whose agenda is to reduce the number of humans who are consuming "too much" of the planet's resources.
The disturbing part of this is that it is ~SIX meters across and was detected only FIFTEEN hours before closest approach. At that time it was 0.003 AU away (~448,794 km).
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2009%20VA;orb=1
Looking at it with respect to the amount of sky that it occupied and working it up to a 1 km sized object, it could have been 0.5 AU out and would have fit the detection parameters of this event.
That’s unnerving. I certainly ‘hope’ that we are better than that because there would be a lot of ‘change’ for people within 50 miles of a 1 km impactor.
RE: so can stewing in a pot of CO2 driven heat.
Yeah, too bad we can’t control the climate.
That is, even IF we wanted to…
Even IF we needed to.
This isn’t a ‘reality-based’ movie. Sorry.
When we get hit I hope that it is a small one as opposed to one that smashes an
entire city or even a country.Although I doubt even that would wake us up..
I think John Phillips has a good point.
If the solution to the meteor hazard involved hobbling industry in the West, particularly in the United States, you can bet that the liberals would be screaming about the asteroid threat.
Ditto if there were some way to blame asteroids on white people alone.
Sacred Cow (07:43:32) :
How about changing the headline to “near collision?” A “near miss” would be a collision. Sorry, pet peeve.
Here they’re thinking ‘near’ as opposed to a ‘wide’ miss, while near collision doesn’t quite pair with wide collision. Perhaps it’s the 113th nearest miss on record. Or the 3rd warmest miss since records began.
In the spirit of NOAA, let’s call it a ‘mild’ miss.
I have posted on WUWT about the need for a (three for redundancy) space elevator system. If this “near collision” did not bring home the need for easy access to near space, I don’t know what will.
David in Davis (07:59:24) :
The chart is only for November’s close approaches of PHAs. The Date column is when the closest approach occurs and the Miss distance column shows how close the asteroid will be where “LD” equals Lunar distance.
Even though it is actually a greater threat to our lives than is any GHG, by many magnitudes, please don’t start here another hype about it, too! 😉 Unless you can manage to divert the funds spent on climate action to asteroid action.
One unseen space rock, yes.
David Ball – Urgency in getting our eggs out of this basket is not relevant to theoretical space elevators until a suitable material exists. With perceived urgency, we can already use nuclear and chemical power to get a significant gene pool started elsewhere…and use it to establish infrastructure to control asteroids.
Great SciFi scenario David. Currently we would need ET tech assistance to construct anything strong enough and it would probably cost about 20 years of Global GDP. Just eyeballing the numbers.
John (09:03:23), this idea doesn’t seem to be very well supported, according to the inter-web! 😉
Most articles that come up when searching say these “chevrons” are sand dunes.
[snip]
GORE: Hey Arnie, didn’t you do a space movie where you blew up an asteroid heading for Earth?
GOVERNATOR: That was Bruce Willis, I was in ‘Total Recall’.
GORE: I want to do a movie with asteroids colliding, making a big freeze up, followed by more global warming caused by methane release from the asteroids hitting the sea bed. Kinda like ‘the day after the day after tomorrow’. You could star in it.
GOVERNATOR: Name’s too long. How about we do it as a sequel to my movie? We could call it ‘Total Bullshit’
Why don’t we instrument these things when they pass so close? Not only would it facilitate tracking, but it would be like a free probe to the asteroid belt. Surely we can tag these close encounters and include a few basic observing instruments at a reasonable cost, when they are in our face.
marky48 (10:57:15) :
“This is the stuff of movies. I was in two of them. While an asteroid can be a civilization ender, so can stewing in a pot of CO2 driven heat. You would think a weather man could grasp this, but politics can be a slatewiper.”
How is it you know that warming (for whatever reason) is a civilization killer?? Surely not because you claim to have been in two movies. Look, we can cope with hot weather, but getting hit on the head with a big rock we can’t. Quit drinking the koolaid.
[SNIP]
G. Karst (15:57:31) :
“Why don’t we instrument these things when they pass so close? ”
One reason is that no one even knew about it till 15 hours before it went sailing through our satellite paths. If you have any suggestions about how we could tag rocks flying thru space at enormous speeds, share them.
[snip]
David Ball (12:57:57) :
“I have posted on WUWT about the need for a (three for redundancy) space elevator system. If this “near collision” did not bring home the need for easy access to near space, I don’t know what will.”
Did you realize that this object was in “near space”? And you want a highway to “it”?