City-Sized Asteroid to Pass Earth This Fall 340
FiniteLoop sends a collection of links about a city-sized asteroid named Toutatis which will approach - but miss - Earth this September. MSNBC also has a story, and JPL and the Near Earth Object program have more information.
Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where can I get a Celestia [shatters.net] add-on for this asteroid?
Re:Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:4, Informative)
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eph [nasa.gov]
Click "Target Body" and enter "Toutatis". The body will be found, and you can then request the data. The question is what (if any) options to enable for it, etc...
Re:Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does Celestia let you land on the asteroid? Does it let you compute your own interplanetary transfer orbits?
(A warning to the newbie... Orbiter's learning curve is *very* steep, but well worth it. Getting the trans-jovian transfer orbit burn just right was pretty cool. Landing on Io was even cooler.)
Re:Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Toutatis for Celestia? (Score:4, Informative)
From this link [harvard.edu].
The parent page [harvard.edu] has many links of interest.
City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not trolling...just asking
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:City sized? (Score:2)
Re:City sized? (Score:2)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Informative)
So its probably closer in size to downtown Rose Bud, Arkansas (certainly excluding the busteling suburban Rose Bud outlying areas)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
On Sept. 29, 2004 an asteroid the size of a small city will make the closest known pass of such a very large space rock anytime this century.
The article also says that -
Toutatis is about 2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide (4.6 by 2.4 kilometers).
Therefore, I think a small town would rather be more appropriate than a small city. Most cities today cover atleast tens of miles, if not hundreds. But then again, its relative.
What scares me is the following line from the site -
Researchers can't predict far enough into the future to rule out Toutatis ever slamming into Earth, so it is listed officially as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. NASA says it won't hit for at least the next six centuries.
Six centuries is an awfully short time, and maybe encouraging space programs and building stations outside of Earth is probably a good idea.
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
What scares me is the following line from the site...[snip]
Six centuries is an awfully short time...
You've got to figure that if we can, with today's technology, figure out its path for the next 600 years, then by that time has elapsed, we'll probably be able to figure out its path for at least 1000 years. Even if we don't advance that far, 600 years is still plenty of time to figure out a plan for saving the planet (although something tells me that, the way the human race/governments work, we'll wind up waiting until the last 20 years, anyhow).
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
Figuring out the path is not the issue, doing something about it is. Unfortunately, even if the space organizations did figure out (I do not know if they have already figured this out or not, yet), there is no guarantee that they will make it public for a while.
Nothing better to stir up those religious zealots saying that in FooBar years the world is going to come to an end. And even the saner public would most certainly be quite paranoid if such a prediction were to come to pass.
That is what makes it far worse than actually knowing about it - a large segment of the population may still remain ignorant and oblivious to this. And given the brilliant red-tape that exists in most government agencies, I really wonder if we would be doing anything about it (except, ofcourse, fund a bunch of religious institutions and proclaim that some voice in the sky is going to save us all).
Re:Religion? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, it is quite funny that my comment was merely an observation of how eschatological religions would react to a situation like this, and the fact that it modded down once again proves that religious zealots abound this place.
It is the truth, religions and religious zealots would proclaim something or the other and cause mass uprisings, and that is probably one good reason why even if the space agencies knew about such
Re:City sized? (Score:3, Interesting)
how about "magsailing" a rock to safety? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's heading straight for Earth, you have to deflect it enough to get past the full radius of Earth. If it's heading away from Earth on the previous cycle, you only need to deflect it by a *tiny* amount, and that tiny amount will result in it passing a huge distance from Earth on the next time round. This is simply because the distance travelled after deflection is applied is so much greater, i.e. a 0.1 degree deflection applied to the full length of an entire orbital cycle (sin(0.1) * DISTANCE) (that value needs to be larger than EARTHRADIUS, so the larger DISTANCE is the better). If it's already headed straight for earth, you have perhaps only a tiny fraction of DISTANCE.
Also if you do it on the previous cycle and mess up, you still have more chances. If you do it when it's headed straight for Earth already, you only get one chance to do it right.
Another factor is if you accidentally cause the asteroid to break up, a huge part of it may still hit Earth if it's headed for Earth. That risk is reduced or removed if it's heading away from Earth.
Yup (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yup (Score:5, Funny)
What would be left after 60 million years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What would be left after 60 million years? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient
Aren't you mixing the concepts of "sentient" and "intelligent" a bit? It seems quite plausible (and perhaps even reasonable to assume) that many less intelligent Earth animals than us (e.g. dogs or pigs or elephants) are sentient, but they don't have the intelligence required for creating complex industrialised civilisations.
Hmm .. if we assume they had built cities or perhaps even small villages, how much evidence of those structures would remain today? Probably nothing if they had reached about the same level of technological advancement that humans were in the year 1900. Even big things like pyramids will probably be long gone (unless buried?). Now we have things like plastics and huge landfills, yet even most modern plastics degrade in "only" tens of millions of years. If humans vanished off the face of the Earth today, I think our buildings and other structures will be long gone in 60 million years, even a long-developed area such as London will probably have been reclaimed by trees, plants, grass etc. However, we will definitely have permanently altered virtually all of the planet's ecosystems, that will be evident. And certain spots where there are high densities of pollutants (e.g. plastics or chemical pollutants) will probably still have higher densities of those things, leaving evidence of their locations. The crumbled rubble of huge cities like London or New York will, if buried over time, probably leave some sort of permanent layer of sediment with "interesting" chemical make-up.
So that's a weird thought, if dinosaurs had reached 1900-levels of technology, and lived in cities and villages and had a global trade system, there might actually be virtually no evidence of it now. Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't thought about it much.
Re:What would be left after 60 million years? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What would be left after 60 million years? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're assuming that their civilisation would be like modern Western civilisation. Why would they necessarily be doing mining on such a scale as to need explosives? Would they even need that many minerals? I mean, we generally don't, only minimally so for industrial uses, and who is to say that dinosaurs would have cared about jewelry? You can have farming, villages, housing and trade without minerals, and with only a minimum of metals (yes you can, study history). African civilisations have been forging me
Re:What would be left after 60 million years? (Score:3, Funny)
Toothpicks?
Re:Yup (Score:5, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Interesting)
>>Researchers can't predict far enough into the future to rule out Toutatis ever
>>slamming into Earth, so it is listed officially as a Potentially Hazardous
>>Asteroid. NASA says it won't hit for at least the next six centuries.
Yes, the solar system is actually chaotic. It is only slightly chaotic, and orbital periods are very long, so I doubt that this is much of a concern.
BTW, if one ever does reach an orbit that will collide with us, we will have something useful to do with all those nukes, no?
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Informative)
You really need to check the facts before you say things like this. Orbital velocities are in the range of 17,000 mph, and solar system escape is on the order of 28,000 mph. These numbers are close, and I'm to lazy right now to dig up exact numbers, but, google will find it for you if you want to split the hairs. Since the asteroid in question is on a solar orbit, by definition, it's velocity will be at/below 28,000 mph. Now do some simple math.
28,000 mph divided by 3600 sec/hr = 7.7 miles per second.
Atmosphere is generally given to be 60 miles deep.
60 miles divided by 7.7 miles/second = 7.79 seconds
Soo, in the worst case, velocities approaching solar system escape, and a vertical impact, transition time from atmosphere entry to surface impact (ignoring the friction and deceleration from the atmospheric entry) will be AT LEAST 7.79 seconds. A trajectory that is not vertical will increase that time in atmosphere. To achieve your 1 second from entry interface to impact, the item would have to be travelling on the order of 216,000 mph, and arrive on a perfectly vertical trajectory. This combination of trajectory and velocity will pretty much rule out any early detection of such a beast incoming.
As for nuclear missle launch, the rockets attached to nuclear missles do not have enough power to escape earths atmosphere
Again, quite wrong. Ballistic misslies RELY on escaping the atmosphere to achieve ballistic trajectories. What they dont do, is achieve orbit, because that wont result in 'dropping on the target'. Most are capable of achieving orbit by simply lightening the payload.
Re:City sized? (Score:3, Informative)
Lets say the 7.7 miles/sec for the asteroid hits earth along its orbit(I don't know the validity of this, but giving the benefit of the doubt). Earth is traveling at around 18.2 miles/sec. That makes the distance between them shrink at about 27 miles per second. So it is more like 2 seconds to break the atmosphere and hit earth, but it is more likely not to actually make contact. It would probably just burn the earth for miles.
This is assuming that it is morning at ground
Re:City sized? (Score:2)
What about Paris, Texas? [paristexas.com]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahahahahah! 600 years? Not a lot of time? ... AhhhhHahahhahaahah!!!
I've got your short-term & long-term [kurzweilai.net] right here.
--
Re:City sized? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, but I said that 600 years is short because -
1. We need to get off this rock at a short notice, not just a few of us but most of us.
2. We would need to either have good space stations that can sustain us (short term) or terra-form a nearby planet (within our reach) or find a way to travel to another sector of the galaxy containing planets that are Earth-like. Remember, we will be going aw
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:City sized? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:City sized? (Score:2)
Or, it's just slightly smaller than Tuvalu [cia.gov].
Re:City sized? (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, but LOC count really doesn't mean much.
How many function points big is the city?
Familiar territory (Score:4, Funny)
Ironic name (Score:3, Informative)
and it's almost menhir shaped, too. (Score:2)
instead of sending up bruce willis to mine into it and blow it up, we need to send up obelix to make it into the world's largest menhir. don't know how he'd get it down to use as decoration for a cottage, though...
Catch that puppy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Catch that puppy (Score:2)
Re:Catch that puppy (Score:2, Funny)
No wait... that's been done already
Re:Catch that puppy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Catch that puppy (Score:2)
It would be great for mining though, as material in space
A more practical thought... (Score:3, Funny)
In case you don't know how to do either of those, I'll tell you [regards to Monty Python, etc]
1) Make a million dollars. Don't pay taxes.
2) Get a block of wood. Carve away all the bits that don't look like a boat.
Nothing personal, nizo, I am just whoring for a funny moderation, but basically what you have just said is slight variation on a slashdot meme:
1) ?
2) use the asteroid for cool stu
Re:Catch that puppy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Tides? (Score:2)
Sure. It'll miss. (Score:5, Funny)
All you doubters are gonna be mighty thirsty. It's going to be a hot dry 2005!
Don't worry... (Score:3, Funny)
But miss!?! (Score:5, Funny)
ACK! "But Miss" sounds like a negative statement. I, for one, wouldn't feel the least bit sad if we're excluded from the city-sized-meteor-strikes-planet team.
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Do not taunt Happy Fun Universe(tm).
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
It's coming right for us! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's coming right for us! (Score:2, Interesting)
If "they" tell us, they can be sure that the whole world is going to break down: riots, suicides, etc... pretty much a total collapse of social structure.
The reasons not to? First of all, it's mean (unethical). Second of all, what if letting the problem be known could potentially help solve it?
I think that, in this case, if I were "they" and it was absolutely known and confirmed that impact would kill everyone on the planet, I would go ahead and let the news out
Re:It's coming right for us! (Score:2)
Re:It's coming right for us! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's coming right for us! (Score:2)
What would be bad is if the amateur astronomer agreed and didn't release the news. How large a bribe would needed to keep them quite? How many people look up at the night sky and pay attention? Could you tell that a little tiny dot was coming at us? Could you tell that it wasn't an airplane or helicopter?
I can't. During daylight I could tell that it was an airplane. At night ti
Re:It's coming right for us! (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on the severity of the strike, the response will always be governed by Elitist Cataclysmic Logic:
SAVE US FIRST AND SCREW EVERYBODY ELSE.
Any strike from an object detected by telescopes will be particulary severe
Such an event means that stock portfolios are likely to
City-sized? (Score:3, Funny)
Toutatis is about 2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide (4.6 by 2.4 kilometers).
Well, most small cities are about 30 feet thick (about 10 feet of plumbing underground, plus a two story building above-ground), so I'm not so worried.
Cause Mishaps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Toutatis was formerly known as... (Score:2, Funny)
The real quetstion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NUKE FIRST!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Seem familiar.. Did they run out of names? (Score:5, Insightful)
1989, 1992, 2004
http://www.iki.rssi.ru/solar/eng/toutatis.htm
Oh! it looks like this headline will come every four years... just enough time for people to forget
Check it out [wikipedia.org]
Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
Just like presidential elections!
(I kid, of course: there's no way to escape election hoopla - carefully distinguished from useful content - for at least 2 of the 4 intervening years.)
This demands a BTAF strip! (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.angryflower.com/astero.gif [angryflower.com]
Cheap new ISS.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Makes more sense to do it that way than shuttle all the crap up from earth....
Re:Cheap new ISS.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheap new ISS.... (Score:3, Informative)
It's roughly a cylinder 2.9 miles long x 1.5 miles in cross-sectional diameter. That's a volume of about 21 cubic kilometers...21 giga-cubic-meters. A cubic meter of basalt rock weighs in at 2800kg under earth gravity...so we are up to something like 5.5 tera-newtons of mass.
We know that:
Force = mass x accelleration
dist = accelleration x time x time / 2
What saves you when you are trying to move something like this is that 'time-squared' term. Doubl
Teaching... (Score:3, Informative)
weighs in at 2800kg under earth gravity ?
5.5 tera-newtons of mass ?
half a newton/meter of force ?
car engine doing a couple of hundred Newton/meters ?
weight (a mass under acceleration) is measured in Newton (kg.m/s/s, not kg)
mass in kg (not in newton)
force in Newton (not in newton/meter)
torque in Nm (Newton times meter, not Newtons per meter)
Explain what the torque of a car engine has to do with moving an asteroid, unless you have found a place
Coming this fall??? (Score:5, Funny)
2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide (Score:5, Funny)
Where is chicken little (Score:2)
Bruce Willis save us!
I, for one ... (Score:2, Funny)
God of War (Score:5, Informative)
Asterix and Obelix fans may recall that Toutatis, a name frequently invoked by those indomitable Gauls, is in fact the ancient French god of war, growth and prosperity.
Invoking Toutatis during battle was supposed to bring about certain victory for the pre-Christian French warriors. Which is why it is such an appropriate moniker for a comet that appears just once every 500 years... ;-)
Re:God of War (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:God of War (Score:2, Funny)
"By Toutatis! The Sky is falling on our heads!"
Actually (Score:2, Informative)
Re:God of War (Score:2, Funny)
the enevitable asteroid strike.
oh hell, I have karma to burn...
Of course, being a French asteroid, it will never hit us, just smell bad as it goes by.
or, similarly...
Of course, being a French asteroid, it will never actually hit us because it would simply surrender once we declared war.
Re:God of War (Score:5, Interesting)
By 1989, I had already started numbering Apollo objects using gaulish gods. One which I had not used was Toutatis since I thought it was an invention of Goscinny [w3imagis.imag.fr] and Uderzo [w3imagis.imag.fr], authors of the well known comic book series "Les aventures d'Asterix". There are several dozens sites about this comic book series, you may want to look at few of them :
One of their constant saying is "By Toutatis", another one is that their only fear is that the sky may fall onto their heads.
I discovered my ignorance of gaulish culture when I learned that Toutatis was ( or had been ) a real God. I also learned that the citation in Asterix was not a joke, but that it had been reported by some historians of Alexander the great who had met some gaulish warriors ( who had once invaded Italy and Great Britain ).
One of the first thing we learned about Toutatis was its record low inclination. This meant that it is indeed ( in a remote future ) a good candidate to fall onto our heads. The name stuck almost immediately at the telescope when I proposed it. Toutatis, also sometimes spelled "teutates" is a totemic deity, to which human sacrifices were made.
Don't be misled, very few french persons do know about the cruel god Toutatis, but most will talk to you about Asterix and his friends if you come to swear " By Toutatis ! ", provided you get the right (i.e. french) accent...
To put things into perspective... (Score:5, Funny)
- 0.01 Texas'
- 2000 Rock of Gibraltar's
- 5000 Library Of Congress's
- 10000 Empire State buildings
- 20000 Football Stadiums
- 150000 Houses
- 300000 Semi Trucks
- 2300000 "New Beetle's"
- 2500000 VW Bugs
- 30 Oprah's || CowboyNeal's
(unit conversions came out of my ass just, like most stats)--
Re:To put things into perspective... (Score:3, Funny)
Planet sized rock to pass our asteroid... (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously I've been spending too much time playing this [fi.muni.cz].
Bottom of the seventh... (Score:5, Funny)
And another swing and a miss by the Kuiper belt, the Kuiper belt is batting a
Gotta keep your eye on the ball, son! (Score:4, Insightful)
I imagine it will be more difficult to do this as things continue to heat up.
-FL
Chances are small. (Score:2)
Wait, where did I read this? Right, it's about time to refresh this cute Niven piece
Robert
Reckon We'd Hear About it (Score:4, Interesting)
If it hits Los Angeles (Score:5, Informative)
Thermal Radiation:
Time for maximum radiation:
3.29 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius:
8.4 km = 5.2 miles
The fireball appears 2.4 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure:
1.19 x 105 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation:
77 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun):
1.5
Seismic Effects:
The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 161.0 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 9.1 (This is greater than any shaking in recorded history)
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 805 km: IV. Hanging objects swing. Vibration like passing of heavy trucks; or sensation of a jolt like a heavy ball striking the walls. Standing motor cars rock. Windows, dishes, doors rattle. Glasses clink. Crockery clashes. In the upper range of IV wooden walls and frame creak.
V. Felt outdoors; direction estimated. Sleepers wakened. Liquids disturbed, some spilled. Small unstable objects displaced or upset. Doors swing, close, open. Shutters, pictures move. Pendulum clocks stop, start, change rate.
Ejecta:
The ejecta will arrive approximately 436.0 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness:
2.7 cm = 1.04 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter:
1.4 mm = 0.0561 inches
Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive at approximately 2683.3 seconds.
Peak Overpressure:
39729.6 Pa = 0.3973 bars = 5.6416 psi
Max wind velocity:
73.5 m/s = 164.5 mph Sound Intensity:
92 dB (May cause ear pain)
Damage Description:
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse. Glass windows will shatter. Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.
So: In a nut shell:
the asteroid smacks LA. A great cheer is heard round the world - that idoitic show Friends is finally off the air, and now nature is here to make sure it never sees re-runs. A fitting punishment, much like that space byport problem meted out for Really Bad Poetry. So, all in all, the erasure of Los Angeles isn't such a bad thing, in the greater scheme of things - no more Meg Ryan movies, Bruce and Demi vapourised - aaaah - not so bad at all!
The problem is:
on the horizon would be a largish fireball, and things here in SF would get really warm for about a minute or two. Then 2 minutes and 41 seconds later, an earthquake hits, the likes of which makes 1906 look like a joyride. Then about 5 and a half minutes later gravel comes flying out of the sky at supersonic speed. Then about 45 minutes later the wind hits at 165 miles per hour, pretty much scouring the bay area of anything left alive.
So, while it would completely wipe LA off the map (YAY!!!) and leave a crater 35 miles wide ( |{3vv|_ !!! ) it will first lightly toast (boo!) then pulverise with hypersonic gravel (EEEK!!) then shake to pieces (Bad. Reeeally Bad) and then blow away (Suckage!) the Bay Area.
Therefore, it is incumbent on the Bay Area to find a way to stop such a rock from hitting the earth, because, as we all know, such disasters only hit two cities: Tokyo and LA. And given that Tokyo is being continuously reduced to rubble by those giant lizards, Moths and Turtles, it's the rocks we have to watch out for.
RS
OT: request for knowledge! (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading this article got me thinking about how often we hear about these 'near-misses' well odds are we had just as many 'near-misses' for the last 100 years.
Well I witnessed a very unusual event about 21 years ago.
I was "camping" in our back yard with a school-chum (we were about 10 years old at the time) and late in the night (11pm - 1am Eastern) We saw in the south-west sky (Southern Ontario near Detroit, MI) a bright orange object. (Bright orange because it was obviously in the semi-shadow of the Earth, bent light thing)
It was about the size of a soccer-ball (held 4' away) and very high in the sky. We saw it BOUNCE twice and disappear over the western horizon.
No flames from the atmosphere, but it was covered with impact craters. (It looked like a mini version of the moon) Very cool stuff that I will never forget.
Who/Where/How can I bring this to (vague information and all) to find out exactly what it was? I don't remember hearing anything about it in the news the next day, but I was probably more interested in GI Joe.
Re:That's no.... (Score:2)
Re:Gravity (Score:4, Informative)
Quick order of magnitude calculation: Radius ~10^3 times smaller than moon -> ~10^9 times smaller mass than moon if comparable material.
Also closest distance is 4 times greater than moon and gravity scales as distance squared so the tidal affects of this thing ought to be of the order 10^-10 times as strong as those from the moon - in other words impossible to notice.
Tor
Re:Oooh! A giant asteroid! (Score:2)
Re:We should be safe... (Score:5, Funny)