Huge Asteroid to Flyby - Science a GoGo's Discussion Forums

A Black massive sticky Asteroid will fly by Earth on May 31.
But because this is a really big Asteroid, similar in size to the one that killed off the dinosaurs,
and it's getting very close to us, NASA has been carefully tracking it.

Luckily it won't hit us, if it did, it would probably result in Global extinction.

This time its closest approach will be 15 times the distance from Earth to Moon.
But....its next close approach will be in 2119,....in six [plus 100]years time!....my mistake tks 4 correction.

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-dark-massive-asteroid-earth.html#nRlv

That's a 106 years time, btw Mike
But wow, if we haven't had enough wake up calls by now...and I guess this is what it takes - enough publicity and public awareness to make the appropriate r & d investment politically viable.

Hopefully by then we will have either developed the technology to steer asteroids away from Earth, or we will have developed a thriving underground culture with stockpiles of DNA for as many living things as possible so that when the big hit comes at least a portion of the populations will be able to survive for five or ten years, then come back up and reseed the Earth with the living things we had before the holocaust. Either way, we ought to be thinking about developing some strategy to cope with the effects of a direct hit.

Quote:

Nuking Dangerous Asteroids...

Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing...

An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said. The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid. The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted

Wie believes that up to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up missing the Earth, greatly limiting the impact on the planet. Of those that do reach our world, many would burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat

http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission.html?cmpid=525406

I think that nuking an asteroid is one of those things that sounds good but might produce some big problems. The main one is, What kind of asteroid is it? Some may disintegrate, some may just break up into smaller chunks, which could still be dangerous.

My personal opinion is that it would be better to deflect it so it doesn't hit us. Of course what we could do would depend a lot on how much warning we have. If we only have a few months then we need to have a fast response, which might involve blowing it up. But putting a high energy rocket on it and shoving it to one side might be better. For longer lead times we might be able to do something as simple as putting a light sail on it and steering it past. I'm sure there are other ideas and they will all have their problems.

Of course the biggest problem is to find the asteroids before they so close we can't do anything about it.

Bill Gill

I'm voting on a Dyson cloud of motion tracking solar powered lasers.
If we'd all band together and build a death star, this would be a non issue.

Nuking is generally considered to be a bad idea. However, Wei evidently claims that his modified plan is the only viable option at relatively short notice:

Quote:

Wie's study has focused on providing the capability to respond to a threatening asteroid on short notices of a year or so...A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.

Well it is going to pass by Earth tomorrow, and since it will be 15 times further away than our Moon, we dont have to worry about it until 2119, when it returns.
But look out for it in the Northern skyfrom about the 2nd June it should be quite bright, since it is 1.7 miles in diameter.

Plus it has its own Moon running around it.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/30may_asteroidflyby/

Its own Moon, here-

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/30may_asteroidmoon/