Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Express reports that a colossal one mile wide asteroid will brush past the Earth this Thursday, with a closest approach of 3 million kilometres – far too close for comfort, with a rock that big.
According to The Express;
The gigantic missile thought to measure almost a mile across will brush closer than previous monsters which have sparked a global panic.
Worried astronomers warned 1999 FN53, which is an eighth of the size of Mount Everest, will skim the Earth in THREE DAYS.
A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.
The monster is more than TEN TIMES bigger than other meteorites currently visible on NASA’s Near Earth Object radar.
It is also double the size of the gargantuan 2014-YB35 which had astronomers around the world watching the skies in March.
Experts warn a collision would trigger an explosion similar to millions of megatons of TNT and would be capable of killing 1.5 billion people.
On this occasion a collision seems unlikely – but it doesn’t take much of an orbital perturbation to put an Earth grazer onto a collision course.
A collision of 1999 FN53 with Earth, especially an ocean strike, would be nothing short of catastrophic. The fire and blast alone would likely kill millions. It would cause massive earthquakes across the world. An ocean strike would raise mountain size tsunamis which would smash coastal cities thousands of miles from the strike. The climate impact would also be significant – the Younger Dryas, a brutal collapse in global temperatures which lasted 1200 years, may have been caused by an asteroid impact.
What could we do if a large Asteroid on a collision course was detected? The answer is quite a lot, given a few years warning. The Manhattan Project scientists, in the 1950s, developed a simple design for a space drive whose capabilities were straight out of science fiction – capable of lifting gigantic payloads in a single stage to orbit. The most powerful designs could have powered starships – up to around 10% of the speed of light. Such a ship could be built in a year or two, if it was a priority, and would be more than capable of pushing a dangerous asteroid into a different orbit.
I’m going to sit outside on the front lawn and watch it go by with my unaided eyes. Or maybe not.
According to CNN talking head. asteroids are caused by global warming. Bill Nye will exploit this one … too.
Remember this?
I was going to make some sarcastic comment about the usual suspects probably blaming it on global warming, then I saw your post.
When they said “the science is settled” I wish they had made it clear that this was the science of the asylum.
Joke mode on/ darn it all, there goes the rapture for another cycle, you heathen are safe for now, joke mode off/
There is a far larger rock only 400 000 km from us: the moon. I would not call an asteroid passing outside the obit of the moon “a close call” at 1 000 000 km
“Worried astronomers warned 1999 FN53, which is an eighth of the size of Mount Everest, will skim the Earth in THREE DAYS.
A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.”
I know exactly how they feel. Yesterday I was driving north on the highway at about 65 miles per hour (about 105 kph) when I noticed an oncoming car in the southbound lane. I nearly panicked, realizing that if the driver swerved into my lane, the subsequent collision at a combined speed of 130 mph (209 kph) would likely WIPE OUT ALL LIFE IN MY CAR!. Fortunately the other driver maintained his course and safely passed by. I breathed a sigh of relief.
But just as my breathing and heart rate were returning to normal, I spotted ANOTHER car in the southbound lane…
Sure hope they got the trajectory right. Oh and, for the love of God, STOP THE FRACKING!
Whaaaoooo !
Here we go!
The Lost Missile! 1959 SciFi at its best.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/114692
Ooh, I think she may have found the missile after all.
And it’s a big one, that would bring tears to your eyes !!
They put all the credits at the beginning of the movie. I guess they didn’t think anyone would stick around the theatre long enough to see them at the end.
Isn’t the Express one of those hyper hyperbolic papers that uses as many loaded words as possible to give the impression that some form of the apocalypse is coming?
For years, they’ve been proclaiming the idea of mass suffering and death as the UK gets crushed by an Arctic invasion (something which turns out to be all hype even amid the recent NH winters). The paper lives off of hype and will take it as far as humanly possible to score ratings.
I check the NASA JPL asteroid close approach pages every day and have done so for years. This asteroid barely registered in my conscience as I skimmed over the list:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
As you can see, there are no fewer than 5 similarly sized asteroids coming as close or closer over 10 days in June this year (15th-25th). Although this may seem apocalyptic, the chances of a hit from any of the rocks in the list is zero. The problem is with the small to medium sized ones like the one that fell in Russia. They are difficult to see in advance and could destroy a city. As for any big ones that haven’t been found yet (we’ve found over 90% of 1km+ rocks) the chances of a hit are very small- once every few million years. It’s nevertheless something we should address and are addressing. Although it’s possible for an undiscovered, large rock to appear one month out from hitting us, it’s highly improbable. As for 1999FN53, the chance is and always was zero.
The Express is definitely not the place to go for your science information. The article is brimming with hyperbole and inaccuracies. I also suspect that poor astronomer was quoted completely out of context. I’m quite sure he’s just as phlegmatic about it as I am. If he’s qualified to speak on the subject, he’d know that there are no known threats for the next 200 years (apart from a chance in millions that Apophis may hit in 2036 due to possibly going through an 800m wide keyhole on its close approach in 2029).
While 1999FN53 is big, there are plenty of big ones that come way closer. The actual distance of 1999FN53 at close approach is 26.4 lunar distances which is 10 million km or 6 million miles as the Express article states. If the Earth were a large grapefruit, this rock would be passing us 100 metres away- hardly “grazing” past.
As for scientists knowing about this close approach, they would have had it worked out accurately within a week or two of discovering it back in 1999. Their calculations would have been to within a few thousand km and a few minutes of the actual close approach time and distance. Their current figure is accurate to within 15km and a few seconds. That’s an accuracy of 0.67 mm over 100 metres for our grapefruit analogy. These are clever people who know exactly what they’re doing. They work according to a very well-established protocol for cataloging all asteroids they discover, their orbits and their potential threat (any potential threat goes straight on the Torino scale).
Furthermore, the astronomers would have known within days or even hours, back in 1999 whether the asteroid would be on a collision course within the next two centuries (including every conceivable perturbation imaginable from all the planets, large asteroids, solar photon pressure etc). This is because 10 million km is a country mile when it comes to working out close approaches over 16 years. They may have been wondering for the first couple or three hours of observations when the ‘observation arc’ was rather less accurate. Once they had more obs over a few weeks and several tens of millions of miles of its orbit, the orbit would have been accurate to within a few thousand km if not a few hundred or tens of km. This is because, being large, it can be observed over a long observation arc (assuming it passes close enough to be followed for a while, which was the case in 1999).
As for other inaccuracies in the Express article, they said it was “going round the Earth” implying it’s in orbit around the Earth. It’s orbiting the sun and passing by at a great distance. They also imply that there could have been a last-minute perturbation that could have put it on a collision course. This is absolutely impossible and really very irresponsible of them. The Torino scale would have any hazardous asteroid and all its potential perturbations fully characterised. I see comments and tweets from genuinely worried people regarding this sort of scare.
The speed of 34,000 mph (about 15km per second) seems about right. That would be the relative speed if it was on a collision course with the Earth. Our gravity would accelerate it to 19.2 km per second, exactly the same speed as the Chelyabinsk meteor. Not a nice thought but an extremely small chance for a big rock.
Where the astronomers do get it wrong is in assuming that all asteroids are orbiting the sun in splendid isolation. In fact there are plenty of reasons why some could be shedding fragments that orbit in their wake for tens of thousands of years. This is why I check the JPL close approach pages. I check the ephemerides of the closest ones and work out when the Earth will be going through the hypothesised meteor stream or ‘rock train’. I then pass it on to a clever friend who refines it on a computer model. Any meteor related to that rock train has to come from a tiny point (radiant) in space, arrive with a specific, precise trajectory angle for any given location on the Earth and have a particular atmospheric velocity. We have so far related the San Antonio meteor (Nov 2014) to 2014 UA176; the Colorado meteor (March 11th 2015) to 2015ET; and Spain meteor (Sept 2014) to 2014 RC. This means that watching the predicted radiant could alert us to meteors before they arrive, including their ETA and location.
One commenter asked re the asteroid’s gravity affecting us. Although gravity acts over huge distances and for any size of object, the effect is so close to zero, the only honest answer is effectively “zero effect”. Even on the surface of the asteroid, if 1.2 km across, it’s about 1/20,000th that of the Earth’s gravity.
Thanks, you’re comments were interesting.
oops … your …
Damn apostrophic climate change.
Thanx Scute, received and understood.
It was closer the first time it passed then the predicted distance of this pass. Its orbital parameters have been calculated with a high level of confidence so its predicted path is likely to be accurate.
I want to underscore Scute’s remarks, all of which check out completely and are salient and on point, by sharing my opinion, fwiw, that this post is so bad that it harms the site.
Ideally you should actually skip the post text and go straight to Scute’s comment for the real story on this “event.” But another approach would be to fisk the original article, and this is what some of you might need if, unfortunately, you bothered to read it.
It’s not just unlikely, it is 100% completely ruled out. The amount of preturbation needed to get this rock to hit earth on a near timescale is not only huge, it’d have to be amazingly precise. Worse, the major sources of preturbation (planets) are already factored in, in the short term. Your only hope to preturb this big guy into our planet would have been to strap some major propulsion onto that sucker. This is really terrible, dishonest, shoddy writing – to imply there is some risk when actually the orbit is well determined on the timescale in question. Shameful, cheap, unscientific, amateurish, attention getting. You can do better.
Completely deflating this sensational picture is the knowledge that NONE OF THIS WILL HAPPEN. You spilled a lot of words on your effort to imitate a crappy british tabloid, so it would have taken only a handful more words to make it clear that we KNOW the rock is not about to hit us. Not think. KNOW. Now, 10k years from now is another issue. Probably won’t hit us around then either, but the odds start going way up from zero because of imprecision in the preturbations mentioned above. For today, though, they are zero. ZERO. ZERO. The fact that you managed to go on and on about earthquakes and tsunamis without making the ZERO CHANCE part clear shows that you are suited for a career in a supermarket celebrity tabloid and not suitable for writing respectable articles for the WUWT blog.
Am I mad? Yes. I like this blog. I’ve been lurking for years. Probably post less than once a year, but I read way more often than that. You’re ruining it with your checkout stand tabloid garbage. STOP IT.
To the proprietors, I hope you can take my harsh criticism in the spirit it was intended. It comes from someone who appreciates the more quality articles on this site. If we get more trash like this article, it will regrettably cause laymen like me to doubt the quality of the more thoughtful and measured articles that are also posted here.
To the author, take a good look at yourself. You know exactly what you’ve done here. And it’s garbage. You owe us an apology and a detailed list of retractions and corrections, with no hedging, hemming or hawing. You were wrong.
“…..this post is so bad that it harms the site.”
100% agreed. It’s embarrassing. I’m wondering if it was written by an imposter. The probability of that is certainly higher than of 1999 FN53 striking Earth on Thursday.
Thanks Scute. I guess now I won’t need to use up all of my vacation days before it passes.
The problem isn’t the big rocks that we see coming. They would be catastrophic if they hit, because they’re so big, but most of them miss.
The problem is the littler rocks that aren’t big enough to see before they hit us. There was a smallish (car-sized?) rock that was observed a whole 18 hours before it impacted over Africa; that was about 5 years ago, and I believe that’s still the only “observed before impact” meteoroid.
On the NASA website, they list some probabilities of an asteroid/meteor strike. http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/back2.html
“A working group chaired by Dr. David Morrison, NASA Ames Research Center, estimates that there are some 2,100 such asteroids larger than 1 kilometer and perhaps 320,000 larger than 100 meters, the size that caused the Tunguska event and the Arizona Meteor Crater. …
“NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small. In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.”
The person at NASA that wrote the text on the probability of an asteroid strike was not a technical writer. I think that he meant that none of the larger objects around 1 kilometer in size are currently on a collision course with earth as best they can see for the next several hundred years. I don’t think they have any great certainty about the smaller objects especially out to several hundred years.
The caveat seems to be: “In addition there are many comets in the 1-10 kilometer class, 15 of them in short-period orbits that pass inside the Earth’s orbit, and an unknown number of long-period comets. Virtually any short-period comet among the 100 or so not currently coming near the Earth could become dangerous after a close passage by Jupiter.”
The close passage by Jupiter could change the orbit to make objects more dangerous. However, I believe if it happened, and became more dangerous we would have several years or decades to prepare for the object.
moving asteriods isnt as easy as getting funding for alarmist climate research.
Gary Larson said it best.
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec11361/002.htm
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll spend the rest of the day sitting in a small boat, drinking beer, and telling dirty jokes.
LOL
Here’s a scary fact for you “cosmic collisionists” to use: On May 12, 2015 there were 1577 potentially hazardous asteroids. (from http://www.spaceweather.com)
Interesting information however, I don’t worry about these things. Why? Because if one is on a collision path, and lets face it, there *ARE* likely many potential objects (We only have to look at the surface of the Moon to see that) and one will strike at some point in time, we will almost certainly not be able to do anything about it other than try to survive the event.
When important people suddenly leave for their bunkers…
I would find it difficult to believe that they would warn the general public of a real pending impact. Guaranteed near misses and Global Warming are reported instead.
That’s why MSM is paid the big bucks:
Insight – U.S. media CEOs are top paid even in year when stock prices lagged
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/05/12/ceo-compensation-media-idINKBN0NX0AR20150512
Investors in some top U.S. media companies have had a rough ride as their shares have lagged the rest of the market. You just wouldn’t know it if you looked at the bank accounts of their top executives.
The CEOs of 11 major media companies were given median compensation of $32.9 million for 2014, much higher than any other industry group in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, according to regulatory filings posted in the first four months of this year and analyzed by executive pay consulting firm Farient Advisors for Reuters. Food & staples retailers came in a distant second at $24.5 million.
It is set to be the seventh successive year media industry executives come out on top – figures before 2008 are not comparable because of the way pensions and stock options are disclosed.
In many of the years, media company stocks were outperforming the broader market as revenue and earnings surged. Last year, though, the median total return of the 11 companies was 10.76 percent against 13.69 percent for the S&P 500 as a whole.
The weakness reflects more challenging times in much of the business, with advertising growth stuttering and the increasing amounts of video delivered and viewed over the Internet upsetting a cozy business model for program makers and the traditional pay-TV distributers, such as cable companies.
Many companies justify big awards by stressing difficulty retaining top talent in a competitive market.
But some compensation experts say there is another explanation – a number of the major media companies are controlled by top executives and their families, which means boards don’t have to worry much about objections from other shareholders. CEOs at companies with less family influence benefit anyway because boards tend to benchmark pay against their major rivals.
Robert McCormick, chief policy officer of proxy adviser Glass Lewis & Co, said the controlling shareholders “can pay whatever they want,” and disregard views of other shareholders.
For example, Sumner Redstone, 91, controls about 80 percent of the voting shares in CBS (CBS.N) and Viacom (VIAB.O) through a holding company.
So far this year, the CEOs of Discovery Communications Inc (DISCA.O), CBS, Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) and Viacom accounted for the first, third, fourth and fifth spots among the five highest-paid CEOs across the S&P 500. The only non-media CEO in that group was Steven Mollenkopf of telecom technology company Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O), who was second.
Often in the media industry, “the pay is not reflecting the performance,” said Michael McCauley, senior officer for the Florida State Board of Administration, which manages pension assets for Florida state and other local authority employees, and holds shares in all four of these media companies…
Well they should be able to see and track it, but if it is coming from the sun, then there are problems. Unfortunately I hope it does not hit the moon.
Wow, the international Snidely Whiplash possibilities are endless. So we see a big rock coming, we build a sci-fi starship, we push the rock out of harm’s way, and then ‘we’ now have a great honking starship capable of shuttling mile-wide rocks out of, and you know just possibly back into, earth orbit. If you get the drift. I suggest we use the U.N. to organize the effort — what could possibly go wrong? :-/
Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis, a top 50 dumbest Sci Fi movies, evah.
That’s right, you’ll have a new weapons technology more dangerous than H bombs without all that nasty fallout to worry about. Something that few people urging us to hurry up and learn to protect earth against this sort of thing ever stop to consider. On the other hand, it would provide a potent motive for the colonization of the solar system as different groups tried to gain and maintain military control of large rocks in strategic orbits.
The concept has been done; “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, by Heinlein, and “The Mote In God’s Eye”, by Larry Niven.
For Niven (and Pournelle) don’t you mean “Lucifer’s Hammer”?
lowercasefred writes: “For Niven (and Pournelle) don’t you mean “Lucifer’s Hammer”?”
Actually, “Lucifer’s Hammer” would be the “natural impact” story. In “The Mote In God’s Eye”, the Moties had (during various phases of their long history) moved all of the asteroids into orbits that would never hit the planet – except during their wars, in which case the asteroids were aimed to impact surface targets.
Ah, yes, “The Mote in God’s Eye”. One of the top 5 Sci-Fi books of all time.
But don’t forget “Ringworld” series in which they had a world the entire orbital length of a planet, many, many thousands of miles wide, plus cannons to shoot down any asteroids and comets – and intruders. And full-sized maps of Earth and Mars, laid out flat. And they had sunscreens like banners, tied together in their own orbits, to simulate day and night.
asybot: “and remember how they all laughed at von Daniken.” Yes, they did. And with good reason!
And con Daniken laughed all the way to the bank.
He sure got my attention when I was a 13 year old boy living in Peru surrounded by Inca ruins, as he did that of my 13 year old amigos. My dad, a leading engineer in his field, just shook his head and said “What a crock!”
He’d get a big kick out of this post, at least Von Dainiken’s ideas impressed 13 year olds. Most 13 year olds these days have the ability to investigate the facts, and say “What a crock!” for themselves.
Man if they were to be an asteroid heading towards earth that will kill 1.5billon people then they should send a missile towards the asteroid and that would split it up into Small pieces but before it even hit earth it going to compact together which make it mostly impossible to kill someone and if it doest that it sucks for that guy
Would you rather stand in front of a lousy marksman who has a rifle or would you prefer he had a shotgun?
We wouldn’t be doing this unless we were sure the asteroid were going to hit the earth. So a more accurate analogy would be standing in front of an expert marksman with a rifle or a shotgun.
How about, would you rather stand in front of an expert marksman armed with a rifle, or one armed with a shotgun loaded with birdshot.
If we can fragmentize a very large object and turn it into objects the size of Tunguska (~120 meters) or Chelyabinsk (~50 meters), I’d take that any day. Even if they were 200 meters or 400 meters, they’d kill cities, perhaps, but they wouldn’t take out all of humanity.
I choose the shotgun. We honestly don’t have a better capability right now.
Just thinking out loud:
I’d think about doing it with 2 or more simultaneous H-bombs on either side of the object, to maximize the concussive force – timed just right (whichever we can determine that would be). It might be better to stagger the timing a few seconds or minutes, in order to double or triple whammy the original fragments. Why put all your marbles on one H-bomb? And doing only one would possibly leave it mostly in two halves – which WOULD be perhaps doubly dangerous. But 2 or 3 of them babies could do a rock crusher job on a 1000 meter object. Gravel is MUCH better than a boulder.
If 10,000 Chelyabinsks came in, mostly all we’d have is about 10 to 20 million broken windows, based on 2013. All Chelyabinsk-sized objects would burn up in the atmosphere. That is something e need to have learned from that experience: Medium-to-small is GOOD.
If a few ended up BIGGER than Tunguska-sized, a few towns or cities might get a good whack, and maybe a few million would die. But the vast majority of humans and cities would survive. Anything Tunguska and smaller is essentially like a big tornado or strong hurricane in its damage potential. Yes, Tunguska took out X number of pine trees. But so do big hurricanes.
I see that all as far more survivable than one 1000 meter one like went into Jupiter in 1994.
It’d be LOUD and for some a helluva light show, but we’d almost all live to laugh about it. And for each of those 10,000 fragments, there’d be a million or so harmless shooting stars. That would be a sight.
A 1000 meter one would be well within the impact area of an H-bomb, so getting the destructive energy where we wanted it wouldn’t be a problem.
Years ago three slightly stoned young me were playing with a home computer, and decided to program it to simulate a solar system by placing random objects of random masses and randob velocities in close proximity and plotting the results on a pixel basis.
After several hours of plotting various starting points a few things became apparent
– the solar system is the way it is because its the only remotely stable configuration.Big sun in the middle everything else orbiting it in more or less circular orbits with a few massively elliptical ones that cannot be high mass, or they fling the planets out of orbit.
– and small stuff that comes on on steeply elliptical orbits tends to either get captured or flung out of orbit altogether. Or both, one after the other.
-actual collisions are so rare as to be most uninteresting.
– ‘comets’ that passed close to planets were deviated enough not to come back on the same path at all.
-Velikovsky could have been right. Some configurations remained stable before two inner planets got involved and moved each other to new orbits or out of the whole system.
– inner planet orbits were not constant with time, The many body problem made their orbits strange attractors. The deviations were not much, but showed even on the low resolution screen.
I’ve not bothered much about stuff hitting the earth since.
Its very low probability and the chances of something big enough being exactly in the right place after many billions of years is very very low. if its as close as three million I doubt it will ever come back either. Thats gonna bend its orbit a fair bit – and it doesn’t take much.
Presumably in the past there was a lot more debris whizzing about which has since tidied itself up but if we are in dwarf Sagittarius galaxy merging with Milky Way then there may be more randomness in future ?
Great timing!!
This is the Daily Express for goodness sake. Not known for the accuracy of it’s reporting any scientific issue. It breathlessly forecasts disastrous weather every other day which turns out to be nonsense and makes much of it’s money from it’s porn empire. Reporting this about as valid as quoting the Daily Mail or National Enquirer. I’m sure you can do better than this.
A collision would be nothing short of catastrophic triggering mass destruction, earthquakes and global extinction.
Experts warn a collision would trigger an explosion similar to millions of megatons of TNT and would be capable of killing 1.5 billion people.
So which is it? If population of the world is over 7 billion then 1.5 billion is only a fraction of that so there wouldn’t be extinction. Not to say that the place wouldn’t need a lick of paint afterwards of course.
So, we have death and destruction on the way? No need for spending money on climate change, then!
A meteorite that size would not have to hit the earth. If it just skimmed the atmosphere at the North or south pole it would be enough to melt the ice at that pole, a truly catastrophic “global warming” event.
The issue though is what catastrophic event captures our imagination regardless of the level of risk and the subsequent reaction. Below is list of catastrophic scenarios, the probability of occurring, and the reaction.
Pandemic – likely – Systems put in place to mitigate.
Nuclear war – unlikely due to MAD – apparently no concerns
Meteorite strike – low probability – Meteorite monitoring system put in place some decades ago
Catastrophic Natural climate change – possible but unlikely – who knows, who cares, blame humanity
Catastrophic anthropogenic climate change – possible but unlikely – make energy more expensive, subvert the worlds economy, damage poor and middle class standard of living
The reaction to anthropogenic climate change obviously stands out as being bizarrely out of whack with the risk.
you missed off;
Alien invasion – unlikely but still hopeful.
The second coming, the resurrection of the dead and life eternal – highly unlikely but who knows ?
An asteroid skimming the atmosphere could not melt the polar ice caps. First off the earth’s atmosphere is pretty opaque to infra-red. Secondly it would only be hot for a few seconds, not enough time to melt more than the top few millimeters, if that much.
It’s possible that the shock wave could fracture the ice, however experiments done in the last century, trying to blow up ice bergs showed that ice has an amazing ability to absorb shockwaves.
Regardless, melting of the arctic ice cap would have next to no impact on climate and no impact at all on sea levels.
“A meteorite that size would not have to hit the earth. If it just skimmed the atmosphere at the North or south pole it would be enough to melt the ice at that pole, a truly catastrophic “global warming” event.”
Ever tried the delicacy called “Deep Fried Ice Cream” that appears on some Chinese restaurant menus?
So many more near misses than when I was a kid. I wonder what the greedy, hateful ones did to destroy our grandchildren’s future thus?
Bernie
The number is (probably) not increasing, but our ability to detect the near-misses, and then publicize the near-miss!, has gotten much better. With no knowledge of a miss, and no publicity that it went by, it never happened.
It’s called the “alarm of discovery”, was always there, now you know, that’s all.