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Near miss last friday

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methshin

methshin

Japans Underground Robot Army
I was watching Daily Planet last night and they reported that an asteroid or meteor (I can't remember what term they used) came within 14,000 km of earth and wasn't spotted until about 15 hours before it crossed earths path. The object was about 7 meters long.

Upon searching the normal news outlets I can't find a damn thing regarding this event.

Daily Planet is not the type of show that would lie about this type of event, I have a hell of a lot of respect for Jay Ingram and what he does.

Anybody else hear of this?
 
First I have heard of it. I just checked over at space.com and didn't see any mention of it there, unless it is buried someplace.
 
Thanks for the heads up ha ha methshin,

First I have heard of this near miss and I was quite surprised at the list of asteroid encounters for November 09, at least so far. When you see them listed like that it tends to make you aware of just how lucky we have been. Just a matter of time I guess until something big enough actually impacts.

It's funny that you posted this anyway for me because I have started listening again to an audiobook called "Singularity" today by Bill DeSmedt, you can get it on itunes.
I have mentioned this before and I cant recommend this high enough, you just have to listen.

It's based on the Tunguska event of 1908,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

and then explores the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis in a kind of Tom Clancy way and though it's not about an asteroid as such I'm sure you would enjoy listening.

Mark


Mark
 
I always found the Tunguska event to be incredibly interesting. I saw a special on it earlier this year where they discussed the different theories of what exactly happened.

Apparently there was a similar event in India not to long ago, though on a much, much smaller scale.
 
Just makes you wonder how vulnerable we all are. One of those things could hit us at any moment and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
 
truthseeker said:
Just makes you wonder how vulnerable we all are. One of those things could hit us at any moment and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
Click to expand...

Just goes to show you that we should all live our lives to the fullest, we never know when our last day will be upon us.
 
Totally - and , just goes to show how little we have control over what goes on "up there"...

Even if they did see it coming - Personally, I don't think would have told us, well at least not until it was way too late to do anything about it.
 
truthseeker said:
Just makes you wonder how vulnerable we all are. One of those things could hit us at any moment and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
Click to expand...

Depends on how much time we have. And if Bruce Willis is in shape.

Anyway thought I would share this Twitter link. I don't really follow it much, but it is by JPL and it tracks such objects and tweets about them real time. You'll find the recent object there. And my understanding (although I haven't read the other links yet) is that the object would have burnt up before hitting ground. In fact metors less than 25 meters aren't expected to cause any ground damage (taken from the Twitter link).

http://twitter.com/asteroidwatch
 
I've run across a site that has a little calculation engine that gives the user an idea of what kind of damage can be done by what kind of object.

Earth Impact Effects Program

If you play with this a little, you'll see, based on the assumptions there, the object from this near miss wouldn't do a lot of damage, fortunately.

However, there's nothing to say that something significantly larger couldn't have suddenly appeared.

Now, I'm going to have to disagree with the naysayers here. We can do something -- all we need is the will and the money. I've written about this on my blog, and I'm absolutely certain there have to be better minds with infinitely better solutions. Offering: "Dr. Dyson's Space Patrol."

The article also links to NASA’s NEOs and Planetary Defense in the News site.
 
I really think that unless we had a boatload of time, we'd be screwed. This object wasn't spotted until it was 15 hours away. Probably the amount of time it would take to formulate when to launch to match trajectory.
 
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