Thanks BenLurkin.
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Posted on 01/17/2018 9:22:59 PM PST by BenLurkin
On February 4, an asteroid called 2002 AJ129 is due to slip past Earth. It is between 1600 and 4000 feet across, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, but there's no chance it will make impact—NASA has calculated it will remain 2.6 million miles away.
That still makes it what astronomers call a "potentially hazardous asteroid," thanks to its size being more than about 500 feet across and an orbital path that carries it within about 4,650,000 miles of Earth.
But while they're confident we won't all go the way of the dinosaurs, scientists do want to keep an eye on the space rock—and they'll do so with the Goldstone Radio Telescope in California. That is one of the U.S.'s two high-powered radar astronomy facilities, along with the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
There are a whole host of asteroid characteristics scientists would like to understand—their size, their shape, how quickly they rotate, what they look like on the inside, and the like. That's where radar astronomy comes into play. "We can actually learn a great deal about objects and start to answer some of these questions using radar observations," Lance Benner, a NASA astronomer who uses radar technology to study passing asteroids, told Newsweek.
Most astronomy is passive, simply gathering signals that space produces naturally. But radar astronomy creates its own signal with the much more powerful cousin of the radar systems used to direct traffic at airports or to tell weather forecasters when to expect rain. It's an imaging technique that blasts a powerful beam of radio waves, which are very long waves of light, out into space to bounce off an object.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Law of conservation of angular momentum would cause the now smaller parts to fly off in different directions.
Thus you now have smaller chunks, many of which would no longer be a threat. The course change of these smaller parts would either take them out of the path of impact with earth or cause them to fall within another planets orbit or most likely, the suns. Further, the parts that remain on the impact trajectory would be smaller.
And I laugh to myself...
The tootsie roll center. One, a two, crunch three. Three.
!) slowing it down and 2) altering the course are of course the same thing. Spinning it would probably be counterproductive, and wouldn’t accomplish much, not least because all of them are probably already spinning in at least one axis.
Putting a solar-powered high energy laser at one or more of the Earth-Moon libration points would be another way to alter the trajectory without close proximity and using the material of the objects themselves.
As always, your post is hugely informative.
Regarding the binary nature, probably most asteroids are made up of a pile of smaller rocks that finally embraced one another, but were once in mutual orbit around a central point.
Hold On Loosely — 38 Special
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJtf7R_oVaw
it is between 1600 and 4000 feet across
If even a 1600 footer made a dry-land hit on the Earth's surface, it would end civilization as we've known it. A 4000 footer would have a good shot at human extinction.
Can we aim it at DC?
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