The funny thing is, if you replay the "Slooh" webcast*, the object was not "re-acquired", or in other words, apparently no one was able to relocate / re-spot it as it neared Earth. The commentator mentions that not knowing exactly where the asteroid is, is a bit spooky.
Further, according to the Wikipedia article, evidently this asteroid was last spotted in March of 2000. That means there have been almost 14 years for something, say, a hit by a 2' dia. rock, to slightly deflect it's orbit. A slight deflection is all that'd be needed. Now, I realize that the odds of a deflection into Earth are low, but, still, yeah... "spooky".
STILL a more entertaining show than SOTU.
Incidentally, about that “slight deflection” business:
One hears a lot about nuking an incoming asteroid as being a bad idea, as it then creates a lot of small pieces that cumulatively might do more damage than a single big hit. I think that might be debatable, esp. depending on the size of the pieces left, but there is a more important point. You don’t blast the thing while it is right on top of you, you blast it a couple weeks or more out. This puts almost all the pieces into trajectories that will miss the Earth / not get pulled into our gravity well. It does not take much (change in trajectory). Earth is really very small, and “2 weeks” in space / distance traveled is quite large.
Granted, this is harder to do than hitting the thing when it is a minute away, but it IS doable, even with present technology. The biggest problem is spotting the object in time.
If an asteroid is going to hit Earth I doubt there is much they will be able to do to stop it despite what Hollywood says. It may be the only time the whole planet finds religion at the same time...: )
/mark
A couple more interesting (related) links:
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
(Impact calculator)
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080129080349AAofRNG
(Some calculations and discussion)
Everybody always talks about hitting an incoming asteroid with a nuclear bomb to destroy it. Unless you did like in the movie, and actually landed on the object, drilled a deep hole in it, and planted your bomb, I don’t believe you could do anything.
A thermonuclear bomb has great blast effects on the Earth’s surface, because it has an atmosphere to compress and super-heat. In the vacuum of space, the only blast you would get would be from the vaporized bomb casing. You will get a hugh (!) flash of heat and a sh!tload of radiation, but neither of these are going to damage, or affect the trajectory of, a rock.
The only way you could change the path of an asteroid would be to land on it, mount a bunch of small (JATO) rockets on the surface, if it is solid enough, and nudge it into a different path. If it is the loose conglomeration of rocks they think an asteroid might be, you may have to throw a net around it, and take it in tow to move it.
I noticed on the projected orbit that it could pass close enough trailing to both venus and earth to acquire a few cm/s via gravity assist...maybe it just wasn't where they were looking. 10 days at 10cm/s is almost an earth diameter of positioning error...