The way things are going down here I’m cheering for the asteroid tbh.
🤞
Eh calculated impact path ranges from south america through africa and india. None of these are where i want it to land.
Same here but I figure the rates are going to be really cheap so I can just use up my vacation days and travel to wherever it hits.
Very kind of you to use your vacation days.
Even if it’s at the top end of the predicted range, an impact would be ~40MT equivalent. Enough to level a city, but not an extinction event by any means; plus the likely impact path is across central America, the Atlantic, central Africa and north India - not really regions that have the resources to respond to a threat like this. Personally I’m hoping it misses, because I don’t see the counties that could do something about it stepping up right now, so you’d be looking at maybe 100 million people displaced from their homes and an insurmountable humanitarian crisis
It goes without saying that this is all because of <enter your deity name here> disapproval of <enter your hated group here>.
And the flyby is a test of ‘deity’s’ approval of our next actions. Either way we should immediately lower taxes on the rich.
/s
Even if it misses, it has a chance to come back every 4 years
So like American elections
Its not that catastrophic.
I’m Indian and I’m OK with this hitting North India lol
Or Pakistan
Either is fine.
What happens if it crashes into Sahara? Do we get glass desert?
Most countries on Earth would treat this as a global catastrophe and put up funds regardless of where it’s projected to impact.
Maybe not the current US, though.
Personally I’m hoping it misses
In midst of all this funnymaking, I’d like to point out for the record that anybody who genuinely wants it to hit Earth is fucking insane. Some combination of sociopath and psychopath.
The only scenario in which I would really want it to hit would be if it would lead to moderate global cooling without hitting populated areas. If it can dislodge enough particulates over one of the poles to block out some sun and give us a couple of years of reprieve from global warming, without actually killing anyone or destroying much wildlife, that would be nice.
It would be an ice agea where crops fail, people starve and we go back to business as usual.
Came here to remark, “In hopes they can steer it at us?”
Hey can this thing swing by and grab Apophis and hurry the fuck up?
Apophis missed the keyhole, so no chance of impact this century, sorry. It would be a much bigger event, too, about 10-30 times the energy.
But, this noise does remind me of 2004.
Huh didn’t think the keyhole event was til 2028 swingby. Neat. Wonder if Esa or Jacsa can get probes up in time for its next approach.
Yeah, I misspoke. I meant “will miss”, we’ve got enough observations that we know the “keyhole event” that was a possibility is no longer a possibility.
Fair. All jokes and nihilism aside. Someone should take advantage of the flyby to send something up to study it.
I think it’s hard to justify since we’ve already done a successful asteroid rendezvous (a few, IIRC) and it’s unclear (to me) what we could learn from studying the surface of this particular one or even studying from the surface of this one.
If we knew how to move it from solar orbit to terrestrial or lunar orbit and then use it as raw materials, that might be profitable. Or at least a nice engineering challenge on the way to profitable asteroid mining. But, I think the delta-V we’d have to achieve for that might me more than we are capable of right now.
I do wonder if we could put something on it and use it as part of a measurement tool, like how they can stitch together multiple 'scope sensors? I forget what the name of that is. Differential capture? Diffusion imaging?
It is an interesting opportunity, we rarely get such close flybys well predicted, but someone closer to the science / smarter than me would have to put together a mission plan.
Hence my wanting it done. ‘We don’t get close flybies all that often. Make the most of it.’
Here’s my nominee to head up the “study”
in 2032
Can someone tell it to hurry up already?
Spoilers: it looks like a big rock
On screen. Magnify.
Enhance.
I got the image from James Webb early.
Spoiler
Don’t look up
Cricket.
But we might be able to mine it for trillions. Think of all the cell phones we could make!
That’s like a new model every 3 to 6 months!
An impact from such a rock wouldn’t trigger a mass extinction like the much larger, dino-snuffing Chicxulub impactor did 66 million years ago. But an asteroid that size could wreak regional havoc similar to the Tunguska impactor that flattened some 80 million trees in the Siberian wilderness in 1908
What a waste
What?
It’s going to be pretty easy to assess where the meteor will land once we get a few more observations, it’s probably not going to hit the earth at all, Webb is capable of so much more and better things than to get caught looking for a piddly tiny rock that’s caught the news cycles attention.
There’s probably larger rocks headed our way that it would observe by chance while it was doing it’s actual mission.
Taking time to reposition it to observe this spec of rock, while there are other ways of observing that rock, is such a waste of mission time.
Thanks for the explanation! That’s not something I knew
For those interested in how they come up with the impact probabilities and why it’s really important that JWST is looking at this, Scott Manley did a great video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Esk1hg2knno
Yeah, great video. Deflecting it seems surprisingly doable if the will is there.
I like how he brought up the fact that if we try and fail, then what? What happens if NASA bumps it just enough to push it from Africa to India?
Finally, some good news in the current media cycle
Can it direct the asteroid to mar a Lago?
DC, please. Move all the good museums and historical stuff first, but don’t tell the administration.
I don’t believe it is a possible target given how the orbital disk of the asteroid intersects with the surface of the earth. That’s of we don’t change the orbit, if we decide that is necessary, we’ll probably try to get a complete miss instead of just changing the impact site.
DON’T LOOK UP
Or at the people forcing politics into every-single-discussion.
Unfortunately in a worst case scenario this gets very political, if we do something about it in advance an impactor probe should do the job, if we decide to play the 1/50 odds and lose then the most effective short notice method is a nuke. Not a direct strike but a near detonation which vaporizes a section of the surface of the object with the outgoing plasma effectively functioning as a massive thruster. Actually doing this is not trivial but not hard either (from an engineering standpoint), the tricky part would be actually managing to launch it without every nation on earth that happens to have a beligerant leader saber rattling and stone walling the prospect of a launch until its too late even for a nuke to do any good.
I hope we didnt cut all of NASAs funding yet. I’d hate to leave that worst case scenario to Musk or Boeing to handle.
Well, this administration has been forcing politics into NASA by cutting funding and making all female/POC/LGBT employees unsafe/invisible. It’d be lovely if NASA was free from politics, but as we saw from Trumps last appointment of the totally unqualified Bridenstone, politics is shoving its ugly dick into science.
politics has an ugly way of forcing itself into your life, if you don’t already think about it.
Ok, whatever dude.
Ikr, I have a bunch of terms on my filter list but then its in the comments anyway
I have separate filter lists for both, posts and comments but I need to keep adding new ones every day. I guess “Mar a lago” is the one I’m adding today.
I’m talking about it right now in this reply but not giving you any keywords. Muhaha.
the correct name is Mar-a-Lago, make sure to include that one, too!
First reference to Bruce Willis.
https://www.nasa.gov/people/nasa-astronaut-deniz-burnham/
We don’t need Bruce Willis, we have Deniz Burnham.
First reference to Bruce Willis.
Xcom programmers say the asteroid has a roughly 2.3% chance of impacting Earth in 2032.
So it’s a sure thing!
Can’t wait to empty a SMG clip into an alien’s face point blank and miss.
I’d be interested to see if they can capture it, rather than deflect the asteroid. We need to work on space-based manufacturing anyway, and it’d be convenient if we could get this thing parked at a Lagrange point for research and practice.
