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.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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The rock with our name on it is the real threat to humanity. There really isn’t anything else with the potential of extincting us.
This rock doesn’t actually seem worth worrying about. It buzzes earth every 16 years, and this year is one of its closer approaches. It has been out there a long time, and therein lies the worry. We spotted this on only its last close approach 16 years ago. It has been this close several times before. We can tell where this one will be for hundreds of years, but what about the ones we haven’t spotted yet?
It is sad that we are spending billions on trying to control the weather, something we will never be able to do (the energy requirements are just too great). We could spend a fraction of that and perhaps be ready when we notice the rock that will intersect our planet.
“near miss” = a hit, right?? Shouldn’t the title be “Near collision…”
This was remarkably non-noteworthy for a WUWT article. A close approach of 26.5 lunar distances?
2004 BL86 was 3.1 lunar distances from Earth on January 26th, that’s more impressive. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(357439)_2004_BL86
Promoting asteroid-near-miss-disaster-scenarios certainly might help wean catastrophists off global warming. But the potential downside is that they might conjure up an even more economically destructive solution than the current favorites.
Unlikely, sure. But they shouldn’t be encouraged to try.
Why was this object/target not selected for the current mission “Rosetta”? Seems we would have learned something of immediate importance and would have been easier to complete! GK
It’s closer, but the relative velocities are much higher.
Hillary and Bill already have tickets. It only took five extra speech events and some line breaking to get it done. It’s was all in the email server but those were deleted first.
What I wonder is, if we knew an asteroid was about to hit the earth, why would anyone want to stop it?
I don’t think we should be so arrogant as to assume we can or should do anything whatsoever to stop a big asteroid from slamming into the Earth. The only way to stop it would be technology, right? Haven’t we damaged the planet enough with technology? And, what technology would we use? Big O2 and kerosene fueled (fossil fueled) 1st and 2nd stage rockets belching copious amounts of CO2. And, how would those rockets destroy those asteroids? Nuclear weapons? Egads. Shouldn’t we just let nature take it’s course? I mean nature’s so beautiful, and tranquil, and caring. If nature wants to send us an asteroid who the hell are we to reject her bounty? Do we always have to meddle with nature? I’d say it’s time to stop meddling and just let that sucker slam us.
Ok, here’s the sarc tag. But, don’t be surprised if there’s plenty of people who genuinely think this way.
sarc/
Perhaps we make windmills reversible with a tilt function then we could blow the asteroids away from us.
Patent that idea, quick.
I shall bring my umbrella on Thursday in case the calculated trajectory is inaccurate.
People are underestimating an asteroid so God should be sending a black hole next time 🙂
http://www.spaceweather.com/
How about the one coming 1.1 LD from earth July 07 which is 68 m? This is very close. It is shown on the graph presented on this site. Scroll down for close asteroid encounters.
Why only a couple of days notice
The Paris agenda build up takes precedence.
Which has a higher probability? A) discovery of a large new asteroid with a long periodicity on collision course, or B) return path of a known asteroid with a collision prediction
If one of these larger objects went on to strike something in the Asteroid Belt, would we even know about it?
Perhaps; astronomers have noted collision debris moving away from a parent object in the asteroid belt before, but at that distance, it has to be pretty big to be seen.
a space drive whose capabilities were straight out of science fiction
Jerry Pournelle described this very well in his novel "Footfall". However, there would probably be a number of protests from people saying that the Orion would increase global warming, or would possibly injure some backyard snail. I remain pessimistic that anything would get done before SMOD smashed into the Earth.
Okay, let’s say someone detects a large, new asteroid with a collision path. Do we head for higher ground, get a fire extinguisher, buy extra food and water bottles, or take in all the media coverage from a safe barricade position? I rather doubt public safety will be much of a priority toward the end.
Why is it that when I look up 1999 FN53, all I find is the express article, and another couple linking back to it?
Where is the actual data? Where is the real information? I don’t follow WUWT for recycled Weekly World News articles.
Here it is. I think what happened was a slow news day and some wild imaginations trying to stir up hysteria over a non-existent threat.
http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/1999FN53/1999FN53_planning.html
I notice above that someone posted a clip by Carl Sagan in connection with Immanuel Velikovsky. Sagan was a vehement critic of Velikovsky’s ideas, as reflected in Sagan’s book “Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science.” I read his critique. Up to that point, I had somewhat admired Sagan, but the sophistic argumentation removed my respect for him. His vacuous “nuclear winter” theory cemented my opinion of him: self-important commenter, wrong on important questions.
Einstein and Velikovsky were friends, and (I understand) Einstein was found at his death with one of Velikovsky’s books on his nightstand. We don’t know everything, and Velikovsky was at least an interesting read.
He is indeed an interesting read if people could just get passed the undeserved stigma that he was burdened with at the hands of Sagan and others who went to extreme measures to destroy his reputation in the public eye. Sagan frequently took the moral high ground by claiming he was impartial and that Velikovsky deserved a fair hearing. Then he would do precisely the opposite and deliberately misrepresent what Velikovsky had said or written. This was a favourite tactic of many of Velikovsky’s earlier critics, especially Harlow Shapley and his student Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin; they would fabricate statements that Velikovsky had supposedly made and then attack the fabrications as absurd. Velikovsky would write a rebuttal and a complaint that he had been misquoted, but it wouldn’t be published. Shapley and others had never even read the material they were attacking so vehemently. Sagan was slightly different: he was just more sophisticated and subtle in creating his straw man arguments. He had to appear to be fair-minded and open to radical ideas (because he was a media darling), but he was in practice quite the opposite. Meanwhile, Velikovsky was still denied the necessary space to respond. The same occurred during the 1974 AAAS Symposium: he was denied the speaking time to respond. So there was no way Velikovsky could win as far as the media and the public were concerned. The public were left with the impression that he had been thoroughly discredited and “demolished”, a perception that still persists unfortunately.
The remedy of course is to read what he actually wrote. Not everything he wrote is correct I’m sure. He’s not infallible. But he certainly deserves more credit than he’s been hitherto given by establishment science.
Next time it comes by we’ll mine it! “The High Frontier” is going to be built so let’s start with the relatively close to us space junk that might hit us anyway at some future point. Just park that sucker somewhere in a safe area of the solar system that isn’t the bottom of a gravitational well.
“On this occasion a collision seems unlikely …”
If we can’t say it isn’t going to happen this time some people need to be out of a job.
I understand about “perturbations”, butterfly wings and all that, but this sucker is only three days out. Any applied force that would change its trajectory that much would blast it to little pieces.
If you are talking the applied force necessary to make it hit us, I agree.
I am making sure I have a threesome before This happens
Hey moderators, I made several posts regarding that Velikovsky guy, but none of them ever showed up?
[Reply: There is nothing in the Spam folder. I don’t have the answer, maybe another mod does. -mod.]
Dang, one of them was a rather longish post going over current theories regarding the formation of the solar system and the behaviors of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and I’m just to tired to type it all in again.
MarkW, every comment I made on Velikovsky apparently spent hours in moderation, presumably because of the name and/or the lateness of the hour here in California.
This isn’t a worry, but an impact by an object this size (590 to 1,300 meters diameter) at 13.8 km/sec is. It comes out to 10E20 joules of energy. That’s more than 500 times the size of the biggest nuclear explosion ever (the 55 megaton Tsar Bomba), and 10,000 times more than the meteor that made the Meteor Crater. The Tsar Bomba caused structural damage to buildings 1,000 kilometers away. An impact of a meteor like this would produce similar damage to anything within 8,000 kilometers.
Someone needs to say that global warming is responsible for this close approach. When that happens, then I’ll know the whole thing is bogus.
For comparison’s sake, how big was the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago?
Best guesses – and they are ONLY guesses – would be 8-10 miles or so. Rocks that small don’t have a “diameter”, as such; they are probably pretty jagged and irregular. Think in terms of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko recently imaged by the Rosetta space probe.
The Alvarez hypothesis that an astronomical impact 65 million years ago killed off most of the dinosaurs (and about 60% of other large land animals) was quite controversial for about 30 years, but has fairly recently – and very reluctantly! – been widely accepted.
This object is perhaps one-eighth or one-tenth that size, and will be quite distant at CPA (closest point of approach). Any amateur astronomers looking to observe it will probably be out of luck; it would take a fairly large telescope to get more than a point image. And a telescope big enough to give you a good image probably can’t slew fast enough to track it. (I’d be happy to be wrong about that; it’s been a LONG time since my astronomy classes in college.)