A meteorite about 50m across caused this 2.5 megaton equivalent hole in the ground. I wonder how many of those guys are out there?
Posted on 08/20/2006 3:13:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
These smaller asteroids (200-500 meters wide) could potentially demolish a city with a direct hit or cause a tsunami capable of wiping out entire coastal areas if they land in the ocean. NASA has catalogued nearly 50 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger. Astronomers estimate that between 900 and 1300 of the larger asteroids exist while there could be as many as 50,000 in the smaller range... Dr. David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center... noted that Spaceguard was halfway to its goal and he expected that by 2008 NASA will have 90 percent of large, kilometer-sized threatening asteroids catalogued... Brigadier General Simon P. Worden... told of an asteroid that entered the atmosphere and exploded above the Mediterranean during last year's India-Pakistan conflict. U.S. satellites detected an energy release and shockwave comparable to the Hiroshima bomb, and Worden explained that had the event taken place at the same latitude two hours earlier and mistaken for a nuclear detonation it could have had devastating consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at spaceref.com ...
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On a cosmic scale, this article was written less than a second ago.
Know if it sent out an EMT pulse or would we only have to worry about that w/ a possible solution to a big one that gets in our way?
Don't know how reliable the info here is, but well... it's got pictures. ;o)
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/v3c16/v3c16-3c.htm
Know if it sent out an EMT pulse or would we only have to worry about that w/ a possible solution to a big one that gets in our way?
Don't know how reliable the info here is, but well... it's got pictures. ;o)
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/v3c16/v3c16-3c.htm
"NASA has catalogued nearly 50 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger."
Anyone see the logical fallacy in this statement?
No?
It assumes NASA (or anyone) knows what the total number of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger. Just means that you'll never know what killed you.
If I have a choice between being hit by an asteroid and being hit by islamic fascists, I'll take the asteroid ANY day.
Sorry bout the double post. I'm surprised I haven't done more of 'em since I started using my mouse w/ my left hand.
Cataloging is prolly more than jes finding & labeling 'em. It would include details about their orbits. Jes sayin...
It's not logic but stochastics.
A meteorite about 50m across caused this 2.5 megaton equivalent hole in the ground. I wonder how many of those guys are out there?
Not that hard to estimate the number of missing.
That's what I was thinking. Especially if the cut off is at one kilometer they could be pretty sure. If they want to extend the count down to a meter they might be a lot less certain since they don't have much data for the small stuff.
Thanks. Gene Shoemaker said that, once an object gets to a mile in diameter, the energy released by its impact on the Earth would exceed the energy released if one took all the nuclear weapons in the world, put 'em in a pile, and set them off simultaneously. Of course, that's give or take a dozen miles per second of terminal velocity. ;')
Too true. ;')
If I have a choice between being hit by an asteroid and being hit by islamic fascists, I'll take the asteroid ANY day.My choice would be for the asteroid to bullseye Tehran, but maybe that's just me. ;')
The idea of periodicity of impacts has been hanging over the whole field since about the time that the Alvarez model started to pick up steam. It's a silly-assed idea, another attempt to downplay catastrophism by making it nice and uniform and predictable. The fact is, the impacts which whack the Earth probably don't come from waaaay out, probably practically all of them come from NEOs.
"Why do we call asteroids asteroids and hemmorhoids hemmorhoids? Shouldn't it be the other way around?" -- Robert Schimmel
"NASA has catalogued nearly 50 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger." Anyone see the logical fallacy in this statement? ...It assumes NASA (or anyone) knows what the total number of asteroids 1 kilometer wide and larger.Yeah, it's just an estimate. The estimate has declined by (if memory serves) a factor of ten because there has been so much work going to gauge the risk. Much of this work has been in the last eight years or so, and has employed radioastronomy, because spotting these chunks of junk (even very large ones) on the sunward side of the Earth doesn't work with optical means, except by dumb luck. The late Charles Fort collected a bunch of such observations, large (because close by) rocks eclipsing the Sun, or passing the Earth during broad daylight.
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