Posted on 04/30/2019 11:31:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
On April 13, 2029, a 1,110-foot-wide asteroid known as 99942 Apophis will speed past our planet at an estimated distance of around 19,000 miles, potentially coming closer to the surface than some orbiting spacecraft.
Despite being a decade away, this future close encounter is causing quite a stir within the asteroid research community. So much so that it is the focus of a session Tuesday at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland, during which scientists will discuss everything from potential observation strategies to hypothetical missions that could explore the object itself.
On the day of the close approach, the asteroid will be visible to the naked eye, appearing like a moving star in the sky over the Southern Hemisphere. Beginning its journey above Australia, it will soar over the Atlantic Ocean in just an hour, before reaching the West Coast of the United States in the early evening. It is during this passage that scientists will be able to make the most important observations of the object—casting light on its size, shape, composition and possibly even its interior.
"While we cannot yet completely rule out a collision of Apophis after 2060, those chances are extremely small, less than 1 in 100,000."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Balls to Apophis.
He acts up, I’ll take his other eye.
Balls to him.
Thanks BenLurkin.
On April 13, 2029, a 1,110-foot-wide asteroid known as 99942 Apophis will speed past our planet at an estimated distance of around 19,000 miles...
That'll be quite a show -- over a fifth of a mile wide, s/b easily visible to the naked eye, even in daylight. The estimated mass of the object should become much more accurate during the passage, and that encounter will make it possible to refine the ephemeris and calculate how close subsequent encounters will be.
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Question: Might it be dragging smaller objects along with it?
Beware the Ides of April!
I just hope their calculations are accurate THIS time.......................
Assuming Apophis is a 325-metre-wide (1,066 ft) stony asteroid, if it were to impact into sedimentary rock, Apophis would create a 4.3-kilometre (14,000 ft) impact crater.[
[I]f a 2036 Earth impact were to occur... a narrow corridor a few kilometres wide...extending across southern Russia, across the north Pacific... then right between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, crossing northern Colombia and Venezuela, ending in the Atlantic...
[T]he hypothetical impact of Apophis in countries such as Colombia and Venezuela, which were in the path of risk, could have more than 10 million casualties.
However, the exact location of the impact would be known weeks or even months in advance, allowing any nearby inhabited areas to be completely evacuated and significantly decreasing the potential loss of life and property.
A deep-water impact in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans would produce an incoherent short-range tsunami with a potential destructive radius (inundation height of >2 m) of roughly 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) for most of North America, Brazil and Africa, 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) for Japan and 4,500 kilometres (2,800 mi) for some areas in Hawaii.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
:^)
On April 13, 2029, asteroid 2004 MN4 will fly past Earth only 18,600 miles (30,000 km) above the ground.
We’ll all be dead due to global warming by 2029... Or at least, that’s what Al Gore and his minions think.
A lot of science, a lot of guesswork, but a lot of fun.
Well, I guess that would explain all those doomsday bunkers they’ve been building.
Of course, the one we should probably be “worried about” is the one they’re not talking about.
The ultimate, “Oh sh_+” moment.
If the bolide itself were not one solid piece of rock, it would come apart during descent, and the pieces spread out slightly (like a shotgun blast), making a more or less simultaneous larger number of impacts. I'm otherwise a little askance at that wikipedia figure for crater size; also a big splash would cause tsunamis (I like their term "incoherent tsunami" but most of the impact energy would vaporize both the bolide and an enormous quantity of water, some of it directly from the impact, some of it due to water as ejecta, evaporating during its high velocity trip. An enormous amount of evaporation and precipitation would follow, and the fill-behind of the temporary "crater" in the water would produce some follow-on tsunamis as the final phase of the impact.
Some of the smaller debris it has collected *may* drift off the object, and as one of the info pages noted, radar observations during close approach should be able to detect changes in the shape of the asteroid, if it is just made up of a pile of mutually-attracted rocks of different sizes.
Only a matter of time before one of these smacks us like the fist of an angry God. Odds are we won’t see it coming. The good news is may be a few hundred thousand years before it happens. But it will happen.
-PJ
I’d say, “We are all gonna die!”
but I’ll already be dead.
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