You can see a live video in 21 hours of asteroid QG42, which was only discovered on August 26th, and is listed as potentially hazardous. It's only 375 meters wide however, so no doomsday scenario yet. Sorry folks.
They are also showing Jupiter where everyone will be looking for the scar from the latest impact on September 10th.
This will be showing tonight, 9/12/2012, starting at 10pm EDT.
Just found this place myself while news reading, so I don't know a thing about it personally, but it looks cool. Not sure if you have to sign up there yet or not, but wanted to get this out here quick for anyone interested in checking it out tonight.
4 comments:
Wow GREAT heads up! I never think to look there and I have a link, You sure it's 10 right now it is almost 5am and it shows 14 hundred and change...well close I guess!
I was just reading an article that said that new studies show that asteroids are
much harder to break up or blow up than anyone had thought to date. The caveat here is that one of the most popular methods to eliminating a threat is NOT to try and blow it up. Now I knew this just from the wrong reasons. I like everyone else thought that asteroids would break up like terrestrial stone, but then we would be hit with a shotgun instead of a rifle shot. But even that may be wrong now, because the stoney asteroids will resist attempts to disintegrate it. It seems that the week force, gravity may have more of an influence on the larger bodies...hummmm
Well, I have a feeling I know what I will be watching tonight!
The only real way to blow one up would be to plant the explosive inside it. If the thing is really big, think how an explosion functions. The blast goes in the direction of least resistance. Most of the power even here on earth is lost.
If we could focus an explosion, like we focus a laser, there would be a lot better chance of blowing one to bits, and have chunks left that wouldn't be such a threat. There'd still be a lot of them, but I don't believe nearly as large or as dangerous.
But again, the only way we have at present, is to plant it within the asteroid itself.
A nuke just sends too much energy in all directions to be an effective weapon against a large asteroid.
At least from what I gather from explosives.
I think that is the popular opinion but it doesn't take into account the gravity a truly huge asteroid would generate. This would resist the initial blast but also would force the aggregate to reassemble much faster than one would expect. All we have to do is look at the objects in the major asteroid belt to know that these aggregate bodied are VERY difficult to "blow up" Some of the problem stems from the already chaotic fracturing and some from the disparity of materials that are the components. Look at Earth. Now I know it is a planet, but in the early days during the mass bombardment period, Earth was hit by a Mars sized object. Yes it did damage but the end effect in fairly short order. The point here is that this blow was titanic with a mass a goodly fraction of Earth's mass, which if it were in a framework we can grasp, it would be like blowing up a building with a quarter of the mass of the building in explosives. By our experience this would vaporize the building but when we look at the Earth you see that did not happen...Large bodies with significant mass just behave differently than is out experience here on Earth.
Thanks. I really didn't want to bring up the damn thing reforming. I wasn't sure if I was right there. That's why I was saying the only way to blow it would be from the center, and blow it big.
Then of course, provided it didn't reassemble, we still have all the little ones to deal with.
But I think overall, having a lot of 10 meter parts hitting the atmosphere might be better than the big one hitting it. You basically are left with one big gamble on this no matter how it goes, unless you can actually disintegrate that thing. One big one, or a whole lot of little ones. I honestly can't say which I would prefer. But if something is headed toward us that could take out a continent, we'd best find some way at that point of facing little ones I think.
I always thought the best way would be to use multiple rockets. Fired in a spaced consecutive order, with low yield warheads, and keep pounding on one side of the asteroid. That could shift it's path so that it missed us. I know about the use of a ship or something to use gravity to alter, but we don't have a ship. And when something is discovered that close to earth, we wouldn't have time to use gravity or the laser theory to move it. Our only chance would be to blast it's orbit.
This area is so fun to get in to. I watch all the science stuff on history channels science channels, etc and read what I can. It's amazing all the theories on what we could do, and not a dang one of those people seem to agree with each other. But here's a question.
Why don't we put some stuff up there that we could use for this event now. Not missiles of course. That would just open a whole other can of worms on this planet.
But this is one of those scenarios that we need to get the world behind. I know so many people that say that we would know years in advance, so there is no chance of earth ever being hit again. Guess what, it was hit about 30 seconds ago with a tiny one somewhere.
I personally am sure that it isn't a matter of if, but when. I love people that think nothing will happen in their lifetime, because it's impossible to. They said the same thing about america being attacked as well. We all see how that worked out.
And you know, I could almost, (I repeat, ALMOST)make a case for all the volcanoes, this asteroid, the Jupiter impact etc for the doomsdayers. You know the scenario, earth aligned with the massive black hole at the center and the gravity shift it causes will wipe the planet.I'm betting they already are actually.
You brought up something one day about the solar flare, and using magnetics. We should do that around the planet and collect all the stuff floating up there. Then we'd have a weapon against an asteroid hit. Just mount an engine to the junk pile. And put it in orbit around the moon. Do two things at once. Clean up our space pollution, and give us a way to maybe use the gravity effect if we saw it in time. All that junk brought together would have to create a gravity field. Tools, parts, dead sats. There must be tons up there by now.
Anyway, just my non sleep rambling here. I'm sure I bumbled over and let a few things out of here, but that happens when you don't sleep enough, or at all.
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