Guest essay by Eric Worrall
This asteroid, estimated between 187 to 426ft wide and 55,000MPH, passing just 45,000 miles from Earth, wasn’t detected until a few days ago.
‘It snuck up on us’: Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth
By Allyson Chiu
July 26Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”
“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.
Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.
“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”
This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
…
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/
The odds of a city buster or larger hitting Earth might be low, but the consequences of a major impact in a populated area would be high.
The unexpected Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 shows it is possible for cities to be affected by unexpected cosmic visitors.
Nobody really knows how many of these dangerous objects are on orbits which intersect the Earth.
If NASA left climate monitoring to NOAA, and spent more time and money monitoring space, the next near miss or worse might not be such a surprise.
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Not too worried about it. But when I got homeowner’s insurance, I did ask my agent about rocks from outer space and whether or not they are covered. No, they are not. They are considered an Act of God, therefore God has to pay for it.
However, meteors are worth a fortune to meteor hunters, so if this one lands on your property and/or impacts your house and turnips and pear trees, you can probably recover the cost by selling the rock to meteor hunters, or auctioning it off.
Big Rocks from Outer Space? If one that size impacted in Lake Michigan, it would very likely sink to the bottom after the splashdown and subsequently produce a high rebound wave, but the height of the wave will/would depend entirely on how much of the outer layers of the meteor’s shell are blown off by its impact in the atmosphere. That is the lesson of Chelyabinsk. And they still haven’t found all the pieces of that one.
On the other hand, if it landed in Chicago’s South Side, it might clean up the place a little bit.
If you want to know WHEN 2019 OK will hit Earth, and possibly where, spin the Whiz Wheel and include its orbital period. Probably not for another 150 years, minimum.
But YOU NEVER KNOW, RIGHT???? There’s one out there with Los Angeles or Chicago or New York or London stamped on it… only a matter of time… and then, WHACK!!!
Meteor hunters will pay a lot for meteors but if a meteor turns itself into a meteorite in the middle of your house in Australia you are out of luck.
Meteorites are the property of Australian states.
The head of state of each Australian state is the Governor who is the representative of the UK monarch.
So bad luck meteor hunters, in Australia a meteorite belong to the Queen even it has demolished your house. Better check the fine print of your insurance policy.
Also, even though CommieBob mentioned the airbust that would accompany
a mid to large-sized meteor entering our atmosphere, there’s also the plasma
envelope that builds up as the object descends before it disintegrates.
From time to time spaceweather.com posts the “sounds” of meteorites zinging
(singing) through the air, caught and recorded by ham radio operators. Most of
these objects simply burn up and the radio interference ends… or the object
passes over the observer’s horizon.
The developing plasma envelope of in-falling objects upon atmospheric entry
is a well-known phenomena to NASA, DoD, and other aeronautic actors. It
happens to capsules, shuttles, even airplanes as they travel in the atmosphere
or descend. Without shielding or special grounding measures it interferes or
blanks out their radio communications until the plasma envelope dissipates.
A fair sized in-falling meteor will be a fast traveling short-term EMP source.
The closer the object gets to ground level the more localized and intense the
EMP effect.
There’s virtually no information based on actual observations of what happens
when a fair-sized impactor hits the ground at speed with it’s plasma envelope
intact. It hasn’t happened yet in our modern world.
The Chelyabinsk meteor happened. You should get away from the computer occasionally. Meteors do not respond to the atmosphere the way our space junk does. They develop the “plasma” envelope which ends as soon as they either disintegrate or the meteor has shed its outer layers. Then the heat, friction, and trail through the atmosphere END and the rock just keeps going.
Sara:
Wrong. You should read more and blab less.
Both the Chelyabinsk and Tunguska events were atmospheric disintegrations.
Air resistance slows the fragments in such events to where they no longer
excite the atmospheric ions.
Read the fine print in statements like “Most of these objects simply burn up
and the radio interference ends”.
Shedding a few layers on larger meteors/asteroids doesn’t dissipate the
plasma envelope… as demonstrated with the ablative shielding used by
NASA for Gemini and Apollo vehicles. Non-ablative tiles were used for
the Shuttles and when they came down, they still had a period when the
“envelope” blanked out their radio transmissions/reception.
Large meteors don’t need to worry about shedding layers of debris.
They hit the Earth’s gravity well from deep space where they’ve been
chilled for millions of years. Such objects laugh at the atmosphere
in passing. Their plasma envelopes actually preserve the core from
cooking.
However, they can become unstable as the exterior warms but the interior
stays cold. Thus fragmentation, sometimes explosive, without ground
contact.
oddly, climate change probably IS responsible for this
The time is long overdue to shut down the entire “NASA” operation at Columbia University. There are more than enough temperature adjusters at other government agencies. I believe that Gavin and his crew should all be reassigned to support the group responsible for detecting potential city killers like the one that they just missed. These are true extinction level events which do not require adjustments to empirical data and rewriting the history of the past 5,000 years to make their arguments.
Lets say this thing had hit land. What could we expect from an object moving at 24-25km/second and roughly 450 feet in diameter at a high angle of entry.
At impact we would see a crater about 1-1.5 miles across and about 500-750 feet deep. Everything for about 10-20 miles would be vaporized or destroyed by the explosion/shock waves. The dust cloud would approach 60-90,000 feet in altitude and place dust into our stratosphere. The ground shock wave would disturb tectonic plates globally.
Local impact would be total destruction of the area. The global impact would be cooling and potential eruptions of many volcanoes around plate boundaries. May even cause earth wobble. IF it hit water the tsunamis would devastate coastal cities globally.
Not sure here, but the short term (5-10 years) should see a significant cool down and have global effects that hit everyone. Maybe thinking it was just a “little rock” might not be a such a good idea and we live with this potential threat every day..
Just a little food for thought… I know very few people who have food supplies and structures that would sustain life for 2 years while everyone fights for available food. Maybe there is some wisdom in that pre-planning.
In 2013,the small asteroid that exploded over a Russian city injured over a thousand people and did damage to many buildings.The scientists never saw this thing coming.And now,another one just missed the earth by a short distance,catching the scientists off guard.The threat is real and the earth may be entering an active zone or an uptick in asteroid numbers evidenced by the recent increase of fireball sightings and increased incidences of asteroid near miss fly by’s of the earth. NASA & the U.S.government need to reach a solution ASAP to try to divert a potentially damaging asteroid,meteor,comet,or bolide from any possibly future earthbound course in which an impact can cause a potential disaster or catastrophe on a city or possibly the whole planet itself.Many of the experts are saying it’s not a matter of if,but when this frightening scenario will happen sometime in the future.
Thus, Trumps “Space Force”
What is the orbital period of this Big Rock from Outer Space?
I’d assume that NASA now has that calculated already, and can give us a guess as to when, and possibly where, we may expect an impact from 2019 OK in the future. That’s a reasonable expectation.
I think they should share, don’t you? It might send the ecohippies off the rails, running for freeze-dried food supplies, camping equipment, and maybe even seed packs stored in nitrogen (10-year life span). ‘
‘This Big Rock 2019OK is somewhere between 187 feet and (maybe) 430 feet in size. NASA missed it. I think they should by now have calculated its orbital period and we can prepare ourselves to go sit on a hillside, watching the skies for “INCOMING”, unlike the residents of Gomorrah, who were warned that something was coming and laughed at it. Of course, we can always hope that it impacts in one of those places where nobody lives, which is most likely, but still…. that End of the World stuff never gets tired. 🙂
What is the orbital period of this Big Rock from Outer Space?
I’d assume that NASA now has that calculated already, and can give us a guess as to when, and possibly where, we may expect an impact from 2019 OK in the future. That’s a reasonable expectation.
I think they should share, don’t you?
They have, see here:
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2019%20OK;old=0;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#orb
They should not be surprised if they knew about asteroids and the area of science, but it sounds better to be alarmed.
Last year passed 13 objects closer than 0.2 LD. Some of them as close as 0.04 LD.
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
so satellites that provide climate data are the same that monitor (tho not tasked for the mission) asteroids?
do I have that right? if not, what does one have to do with the other?
confused …
Chris, like most liberals, you are easily confused….It is really very simple. Option 1 – waste taxpayers money on fake AGW that will kill no one or Option 2 – invest taxpayers money into a “Space Defense System” (part of Trumps new “Space Force”) that could save millions of lives…An impact by a large object is not a matter of “If”, it it is a matter of “when and where”…
Planet killers would be fairly easy to detect but would still kill us all so what would be the point other than dying in the misery created by public count down announcements as in “four hours to die…”.
How about merely continent killers? Who gets out? And how much lead time? And what if they’re simply wrong or there’s a software error or . .
Detection in one thing but one needs to factor in human errors, equipment errors, human nature and evacuation scenarios. For example, how long would it take to evacuate southern CA and where would the go and be housed and fed and watered, etc. The larger the object, the less need to evacuate? The smaller the object, the more practical to evacuate but is that even feasible t detect objects small enough to only threaten a small town and still have enough lead time to make a difference.
Point is just to be able to detect is almost trivial compared to any meaningful action. We all might just be better off being “surprised” than tossing tons of money at a problem that isn’t really “solvable” in any meaningful way.
Finding asteroids that are on a collision course with earth is like a man standing before a firing squad.
You know whats coming but you can’t do anything about it.
Here’s a complete archive of the effects of the Chelyabinsk asteroid, a small one that had been detected only briefly before it entered Earth’s atmosphere in February 2013. Note the most damage was to glass windows and incomplete brick construction sites. At the end of the video, people were at hospital getting shards of glass removed from their faces. The trail left behind by the meteor
This is what you can expect from a small incoming asteroid or large incoming meteor.
Anything inside the Moon’s orbit is considered a close approach and so far this year we’ve spotted 24 asteroids doing that, almost one a week. So where’s the panicky stuff about that?
Oh, GOSH!!!!! There’s another one coming in October this year!!!! Bigger than 2019 OK!!! Big enough to wipe out A Big City!!! Whatever will we do????
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1151014/NASA-asteroid-warning-danger-ISS-yucatan-crater-Asteroid-FT3-hit-earth-October-NASA-news
Apparently, Earth is moving through a swam of these Big Bolides right now.
Best thing to do is to forget it. We have far more risk in our daily lives to worry about, so why worry about a very small risk factor such as objects from outer space. .
As for NASA, yes by all means redirect them to Space matters, and not those best left to other agencies already doing these tasks.
MJE VK5ELL
In the first instance, because it’s a good reason to defund GISS. GISS is actually harmful to humanity.
So the solution is what? Immediately give Spacex a very large thermonuclear device to strap onto a big rocket to be launched at a moment’s notice to blast the approaching bolide to smitheens? Not tomorrow, but now … there’s not a moment to lose! … /sarc.
This is why the whole precautionary principle aspect of the climate change debate is such a farce. Yes, there is a non-zero chance that we on the skeptical side are wrong, and that the “global average” temperature – whatever that is – will rise by 8 deg. C by 2100. There is also a non-zero chance that another Shoemaker-Levy is on its way to Earth, and how much money are we spending on asteroid defenses as opposed to climate change? We can adapt, even to the worst imagined outcomes of any of the IPCC reports. We can`t adapt to a major asteroid hit.
Unless we do cost-benefit analysis we can’t decide the risk. Precautionary principle, PP, disdains cost-benefit or any deep analysis. PP says if someone can imagine an existential risk then we have to treat it as if it’s real.
PS: PP is supposed to be limited to existential risks (AKA life or death) to humanity & our environment.
Earth’s orbital speed is about 30,000 km/s . That means we were about 2.5s away from a direct hit on this one.
2019 OK, missed us by a hair, get ready for 2020 NOTOK asteroid strike.
Well–Meteor Crater in Arizona exists, you can go have a look; it was a meteor about the same size, and it too exploded when and before hitting the ground. Poor Barringer never got rich despite spending his fortune in the hopes of finding a nickel-iron mine under it.
When standing at the viewpoint on the rim, picture the Capitol Building floating at eye level halfway to the far rim. I know there is a lot of talk about the problem of ‘draining the swamp’ in American politics, an excruciatingly slow and tedious process. But vaporizing it…?
Incidentally, when there I had some fun looking around at the distant mountains and calculating where I might have stood to be able to witness the impact, and maybe duck behind a ridge before the shockwave hit. The result was that it would not have been possible to witness the impact from anywhere and survive; anywhere within sight one would have been incinerated. I admit it was an over-a-glass-of-wine-and-cheese calculation with an old criminology-prof friend of mine in one of our camper vans, but it still seemed correct at the time.
Maybe it was two glasses–the memory is a bit fuzzy.
This might be a a full bottle of wine read…
Guidebook to the Geology of Barringer Meteorite Crater, Arizona (a.k.a. Meteor Crater) by David Kring
Thanks so much, Dave; most enjoyable, and you can have no idea of the memories that brings back as the traveling companion mentioned above died this last November just 3 days after we were out to lunch together at a local restaurant that had the for-many-years normal task of shoveling the piles of BS out of the booth after we left. I am busily involved these days as his executor, and you can unfortunately have even less idea of how much HE would have enjoyed that report, and the memories it would have brought back for him.
And damn, our wine-and-cheese calculations back then were pretty darn close!
What if NASA or the Air Force did see it coming but weren’t sure whether or not it would hit? Would they just keep it quiet to avoid any futile rioting or whatever? I supposed the logistics of something like that might be difficult.
I vote we send Bruce Willis and a crack team of drillers to the asteroid and blow it up.
Alternatively we could just concentrate on AGW /climate wang and pretend we can do something about that non issue .
Oh! We are!