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Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth
- torgian 7y agoI still think someone tried to redirect its path and made a minor mistake in their calculations ;)
- ralphm 7y agoThe original article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up...) includes links to some interesting background information, including the event leveling a huge forest area. And it correctly uses square km/miles instead of "square acres".
- chris5745 7y agoI imagine without early and widespread warning, an asteroid impact could be mistaken by nation-states for an attack. What safeguards (if any) might we have or develop to prevent an asteroid hitting country 1 from causing a “counter” strike by country 1 against country 2?
- sudosteph 7y agoNot sure, but that scenario does sound like a interesting plot for a book or movie.
- Yetanfou 7y agoNiven and Pournelle thought so as well when they wrote "Lucifer's Hammer" [1] in which "...China, anticipating the coming ice age launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia. The last Soviet Premier reassures the US that they are not the target, and he requests help against the unprovoked attack." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer
- jacobush 7y agoAnd of course, causing a counter-counter strike from country 2 against country 1. Messy!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ianamartin 7y agoWhy would you do any of that? Comment without reading? Comment while knowing you are not informed? Are you just commenting for the sake of commenting? Is this satire?
- mirimir 7y agoLikely. Protesting sites that require tracking scripts to display text and images.
- thatshn 7y agoLol welcome to Hacker News..
- tempguy9999 7y agoYou're right, I should not have posted. I'll ask DanG to delete it as I can't. It's was not entirely clueless as I actually know a little about this, but still. Sorry all.
- progval 7y ago> Article requires js You can read it without js, when you disable css
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nvrspyx 7y agoWould country 1 counter-strike without getting confirmation that it was, in fact, country 2? How would they know it wasn't country 3, 4, or 5?
- tzakrajs 7y agoSimilar to the cyber attack attribution problem, isn't it?
- lowdose 7y agoStuxnet had some pretty program time traces in the code.
- acqq 7y agoIf you ask what the known U.S. procedures and plans have been, the answer is a resounding YES, they would have nuclearly attacked ALL their enemies at once according to the man whose job was to evaluate these procedures and plans of the U.S. military: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-doomsday-machine-9781408889299/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-doomsday-machine-978140888... Just a sample quote: "I soon discovered that in the plans of Pacific forces, from top to bottom, there was no provision at all for attacking only the Russian targets in their sphere. In every plan for war with the Soviet Union, Chinese targets (including every major city in China) were also struck." In the whole book there are many accounts on that, on the various levels of the chain of command, even intentionally designed to act independently. More transparency is still needed there, probably much less was changed in the following years than it ever admitted to any civilian, including the presidents, again according to the book, so the state is more than scary and when I read that insider info, I consider these involved really completely mad. Most of them Nazi-like "we just follow the orders" mad, and some simply pure evil mad.
- tzakrajs 7y agoOne big safeguard is that no launch would be detected?
- User23 7y agoAlso, it really could be an attack. It's within the realm of plausibility for country 1 to launch a nudging vehicle to push a space rock into a collision course with country 2.
- dandelany 7y agoEh maybe. It strains plausibility. We can't even accurately predict where deorbiting satellites will end up... It's pretty hard to imagine a nudge with the required delta-V and accuracy to hit a specific nation. Too far away and you get too much uncertainty, too close and you don't have enough dV for the push. Even if it could be done with today's technology, the potential for error is high, and if you screw up, you've accidentally started another war or "bombed" your own country. Can't imagine that a military with the requisite technology to pull this off wouldn't be able to think of a less-risky way to obliterate their enemy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Someone 7y ago”We can't even accurately predict where deorbiting satellites will end up...” I think that’s because they are so small. The impact of earth’s atmosphere on a 100m solid rock will be negligible in comparison. Their speed perpendicular to earth also is very low, meaning they spend more time in the athmosphere. I guess they may even bounce of it a couple of times. If so, computing impact location requires calculating how many times a skipping stone will skip. (But no, I don’t think we have the technology to make this an effective weapon. I would go for that rail gun on the moon instead. Still not quite within reach, but it would be a lot easier to get targeting accuracy)
- lutorm 7y agoI think apart from the energy release there are few similarities with a nuclear explosion (no EMP, no radioactive fallout) plus I have to imagine any air defense radar system could detect the incoming asteroid in its final moments.
- idlewords 7y agoSecond asteroid hitting country 2
- gitpusher 7y agoVery unlikely that China, Russia, or US (and its allied countries) would misidentify a nuclear attack. There are massive surveillance resources dedicated toward atmospheric sampling, etc. etc. and a non-nuclear explosion would be correctly identified as such in very short order. On top of that, even a 30-meter asteroid impact would release more energy on impact than a typical nuclear warhead. A 250-meter asteroid might release more energy than ALL nuclear weapons used in the world to date.
- sanxiyn 7y agoAtmospheric sampling is definitive but slow, because it necessarily propagates at wind speed. I do agree misidentification is very unlikely.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoThey would identify initially using the global seismic network..
- rixed 7y agoFailure to automatically launch the missiles. In that case that might even be planned incompetence.
- caymanjim 7y agoThis is a legitimate concern with the "young" nuclear powers, like India and Pakistan. Their detection technology is less mature; their command-and-control systems are less mature; there's a higher level of tension between the two. Neither country is incompetent or hungry for war, but it's worrying to me. I'd expect them to behave rationally, but if the timing happened to coincide with a particularly combative episode, things could get out of control. I'm not even going to speculate about how North Korea might react; they're a total wildcard.
- vinayms 7y agoThis is just alarmist. The bravado shown on TV is surely not taken seriously by the authorities themselves for they know the consequences. So even if the point of impact coincides with the crescendo of tension to the T, sanity will prevail despite it seeming otherwise.
- familysized 7y agoThat is a very naive point of view. You don't know that their systems are "less mature". And do you really think thousands of seasoned scientists on both sides are going to misclassify any such event?
- walrus01 7y agoMajor nuclear powers all operate satellite based infrared launch detection systems. A rocket launch is a very unique thermal signature. I imagine China and Russia have satellites watching the north Dakota icbm fields, and vice versa.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lisper 7y agoIf this sort of thing concerns you, you might want to consider supporting this organization: https://b612foundation.org https://b612foundation.org
- lucb1e 7y agoI honestly think we have bigger problems right now, like spending money on ways to reduce greenhouse gasses. We need to develop alternatives to non-renewables and, until we can use the alternatives, work on removing the gasses from the atmosphere. Putting my money where my mouth is: I've been looking into this and as soon as I get my credit card (to be able to pay, I've never needed a CC before), I will sign up with https://climeworks.com https://climeworks.com to recapture some of my CO2. They seem to be one of the few that are actually capturing right now, so the money will be used for real capture, not just R&D that might yield results in the future. But to spread the risk, I am also going to spend money on the more traditional method of planting trees (which company is TBD, I have yet to find one that actually guarantees that they (or the locals) won't rip the tree out before it had a chance to capture its promised CO2). On the reduction side, I travel to work by public transport, work from home (it stays naturally cool) instead of using our office air conditioning unit, have a 100% renewable energy contract at home, etc.
- projektfu 7y agoIt's called B612 Foundation and not a single reference to the Little Prince on the homepage besides the name? Weird.
- lisper 7y agoYeah, there is an explanation, but it's well hidden: https://b612foundation.org/ever-wondered-where-the-name-b612-came-from/ https://b612foundation.org/ever-wondered-where-the-name-b612...
- Syzygies 7y agoIt missed Earth by 73,000 kilometers; Earth has radius 6,371 kilometers. (79371 * 79371) / (6371 * 6371) = 155.2 This was a game of darts in a galactic pub. The dart hit the dart board, but not the bullseye (Earth). One in every 155 times we play this game, it ends badly.
- rosser 7y agoAssuming no other conditions change, and that the object crosses Earth's orbit as the planet is passing by, and so on. I'd be willing to bet, however, that this object's orbit permutes a bit with every pass, especially dipping that deeply into the gravity wells of other, much more massive, objects.
- pault 7y agoOn galactic scales that's more like glancing off the ring of the bulls eye.
- Cacti 7y agoOn galactic scales it’s a meaningless analogy.
- eridius 7y agoHow does the math change when you take into account the fact that Earth exerts a gravitational pull on the asteroid?
- Skunkleton 7y agoInteresting question, not sure. As the speed of the astroid is goes up, the relevance of gravity goes down. As the speed goes down, the damage it can do also goes down, and also reduces the probability of an encounter.
- quickthrower2 7y agoAnd does that make it more likely to miss? Ie it gets slung around by gravity instead of hitting?
- dv_dt 7y agoIt's too bad the "space force" isn't setup just for this.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoScientists are already searching for and tracking such objects. More funding would be nice but we definitely don't need the US to break more treaties in order for the world to track NEOs.
- antepodius 7y agoWho really cares about the space treaty? It'd be nice to have a well-funded group that has 'making sure no asteroids hit us' as part of its motto
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoRussia and China would create a space force if the US did...
- dv_dt 7y agoMaybe we should create a world anti-asteroid space force...
- dv_dt 7y agoI meant just as in exclusively for this. And what is the point of tracking them if we don't plan to do anything about them?
- mturmon 7y agoYou can browse recent approaches at: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/ To isolate to really near stuff, choose +/- 30 days, and Nominal distance <= 1LD (lunar distance). The asteroid in OP is linked to here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2019%20OK https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2019%20OK -- there's an orbit diagram.
- ratsmack 7y agoThe interactive 3D orbital graphic is great for visualizing the orbits and how they cross the Earth's path.
- tunesmith 7y ago"More than 90 percent of those (extinction-level) asteroids, which are 1 kilometer, 0.62 miles, or larger, have already been identified by NASA and its partners." How do they know it's 90%? I mean, if the denominator is unknown? If the denominator is known, then doesn't that mean they've identified them?
- Cacti 7y agoIt’s a statistical argument based on the observed distribution of asteroids. It’s not precisely true, and could even be widely incorrect, but they think it’s likely to be in the correct neighborhood. Also, after a certain size things become significantly easier to detect with your existing instruments, so there is some confidence from that.
- parcec 7y agoRelated to this (though maybe not directly applicable), in certain scenarios there is a difference between what can be reliably detected vs tracked. For example, in the context of debris orbiting the earth, our radars can take LEO census measurements down to 3-4mm, even though we can only reliably track things on the ~10cm size range. We can therefore semi-confidently say we know how many 1cm objects there are out there, even if we can’t predict the trajectory of any single one. (Similar to atoms, really)
- mattkrause 7y agoAbundance estimation is a big problem in ecology (and other fields), and they’ve developed some clever ways to estimate population sizes without doing an exhaustive census. One popular approach is a capture-recapture experiment. On your first trip, you find as many of your targets as possible and mark each one. With turtles, you might paint something on the shell; here, it might be something like determining its orbit and other characteristics. You wait a bit, and search again (starting from scratch), but this time you separately record the number of “new” specimens and the number recaptured. A tiny bit of algebra from these three numbers gives you an estimate of the population size.
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- ghostDancer 7y agoPlanetary defense from Planetary Society if you want to help or participate http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/planetary-defense/ http://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/planetary-defense/
- shoo 7y agoon another hand, if you see a gamma-ray-burst heading this way, duck and cover... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HvwNOSnveE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HvwNOSnveE
- thatswrong0 7y agoI mean that’d be near instant vaporization wouldn’t it? For some reason that makes me less scared about it since you wouldn’t really know what’s happening before it’s all over
- omegaworks 7y agoNo, according to the video gamma ray burst means increase in UV potentially damaging DNA of phytoplankton, global cooling due to NO2 solar energy reflection. It'll be pretty slow, but at a large scale.
- r3dk1ng 7y agoYour comment made me think of whether a GRB could have caused the cambrian explosion. So I searched for that and found this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.7303 https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.7303
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoI have no reason to doubt this story - that it caught everyone by surprise. But if such an asteroid was discovered in advance and it was determined we were at high risk of being hit, I'm not so sure the public at large would be notified in every circumstance. If the impact would be large enough and/or the warning short enough, getting people panicky might do more harm than good.
- dandelany 7y agoThe problem with this idea is that it rests on two incorrect assumptions - that there is some governing body that would be able to prevent the release of such information, and that we would immediately know upon detection that the asteroid was on a collision course. In fact, in this case, the asteroid was detected independently by the SONEAR survey in Brazil and the ASAS-SN telescope network run by Ohio State University. Neither of these would fall under the "jurisdiction" of NASA or any governmental organization that would effectively be able to prevent them from talking about it. ASAS-SN tweeted the discovery, and I'm quite sure they didn't have to ask anyone permission to do so. Secondly, the first few observations of a newly-discovered near-Earth object are generally not enough information to calculate the object's orbit accurately enough to know if it will hit Earth or not. So what do scientists do when they discover one? They immediately report it to the IAU and get the word out to as many other astronomers as possible, in order to obtain more observations & accurately determine the orbit. As a result, it's hard to imagine how such a discovery could be kept secret.
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago>The problem with this idea is that it rests on two incorrect assumptions - that there is some governing body that would be able to prevent the release of such information, and that we would immediately know upon detection that the asteroid was on a collision course. Not necessarily. Only a couple people knew about this one before it had whizzed by. While I agree it'd be impossible to keep an upcoming impact secret, if the timeframe is short enough it would only take a few select people to keep it contained long enough to no longer matter. And choosing to keep it secret wouldn't only be done if collision was known to be certain. Just having a moderate chance of impact might be enough.
- jmkappz 7y agoJPL Horizons is awesome for this. You can easily obtain the information on your own using the ephemerides at https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi#top https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi#top : - minimum distance of 71350 km (44,334 miles vs 45,360 in article) - Speed around 24.5 km/s (15.2 miles/sec vs 15 in article) - Closest on july 25 at 01:21 UTC Here's a rendering of the trajectory of the asteroid and the moon in july to get an idea of how close it came (moon orbits around 384,000 km from earth): https://imgur.com/a/3JaakFJ https://imgur.com/a/3JaakFJ
- phkahler 7y agoAn asteroid on collision course will not be seen. I just realized an old concept applies here. When two objects are on a collision course with each traveling in a straight line, the apparent heading toward one as viewed from the other does not change. In other words, when a deer runs in front of a car, the angle to the deer doesn't change - it just gets bigger as you close in, but position in your field of view doesn't change. Astronomers look for things moving against the background sky, but over a short enough time span (maybe a few days) the earth and an asteroid are moving almost in straight lines. That means all you'd see is a speck of light that gets brighter as it gets closer, but does not appear to move against the distant background stars. Has anyone quantified this phenomenon with respect to asteroid hunting?
- Smithalicious 7y agoThis would be true if the asteroid and the earth are both points. Obviously, they aren't. An observing scientist would not see it this way unless it were heading directly for them.
- phkahler 7y ago>> An observing scientist would not see it this way unless it were heading directly for them. That was my point exactly. An asteroid heading directly towards us will not appear to be moving against the background. If that movement is required in their detection methods, it will fail for the most dangerous ones.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoI suspect that astronomers are using exactly this principal to search for NEOs.
- krzat 7y agoI'm not an expert, but I imagine that astronomers are pretty good at determining brightness of objects. And space stuff moves in orbits anyway.
- partiallypro 7y agoThe likelihood it would hit a highly populated area is still incredibly slim even if it did strike earth. I wonder if there are some smaller asteroids on rare occasions just landing in the ocean that we don't really know about.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoThe distribution of orbits, and hence strikes, is an interesting problem. Here is a plot of population against latitude: https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitude/ https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitu... I assume a bias to the ecliptic, hence the area within the tropics is more likely to get hit. Big spikes for Jakarta, Dhaka, Shanghai/PRD, Delhi/Mumbai/Karachi/Lahore, Kinshasa, Lagos ... I also suppose you could attack the problem in two ways: historical strikes (confounded by erosion, tectonics and subduction), and orbital statistics, perhaps weighted by asteroid size. Anyone have refs for this?
- mkl 7y agoThis is actually really common for smaller ones: 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth_in_2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approac... 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approac... 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth_in_2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approac... 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth_in_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approac... All the ones coloured red in the tables (the majority) weren't discovered until after their closest approach.
- m0zg 7y agoSo here's what I was wondering for quite some time: if, let's say, hypothetically, there were an object approaching Earth at nearly the speed of light, is there any way in our frame of reference to even detect it? And is it possible for such an object to exist in our universe, and if not, why? The math seems to work out such that the object the size of a US quarter (5.67g) at 0.999 C will have a relativistic kinetic energy around 2.6MT of TNT.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIf something travels nearly the speed of light we couldn’t detect it. Any kind of information from this object would at maximum travel at the speed of light so this information would arrive only a little sooner.
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoI might be wrong, but in a previous comment [0] a few days ago I noted that the asteroid composition is mostly ice, which means it should be much less dangerous than a "rock". [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508618
- xenonite 7y agoSimilary, the Seattle Post writes: > Lakdawalla said that while the asteroid’s close brush with Earth may have sparked some concern, “it is zero percent danger to us. It’s the kind of thing where you learn about something that you didn’t know about, like things flying close by us, and your inclination is to be scared,” she said. “But just like sharks in the ocean, they’re really not going to hurt you and they’re really fascinating to look at.”
- ycombonator 7y agoAsking for a friend, is it not possible to park phased array satellites out at 43,000 KM orbit looking for faint smaller asteroids with current technology?
- rishav_sharan 7y agoTechnically, yes. Politically? We don't use the word sense with politics.
- pulkitsh1234 7y agoFor those interested, you can watch Joe Rogan's podcast with Randall Carlson on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A
- scraplab 7y agoI made a Twitter bot @lowflyingrocks, that tweets whenever something passes close enough to note. If you find Twitter doesn’t offer you enough existential dread already you might like it. It scrapes the JPL data hourly, and it’s satisfying when it picks up these close passes discovered at short notice: https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks/status/1154200085808525314 https://twitter.com/lowflyingrocks/status/115420008580852531...
- fabiandesimone 7y agoThis is fantastic, thank you!
- codeulike 7y agowhat does '2019 OK' mean, is that the rock name? It would be good if your bot attached some sort of 'oh shit' scale, based on size and closest approach
- Rexxar 7y agoIt seems to be a naming convention for provisional names (https://www.quora.com/How-are-asteroids-named https://www.quora.com/How-are-asteroids-named) 2019 OK : - "2019" => discovered in 2019 - O => discovered in 2nd half of july - K => 10th object discovered in this period
- yummybear 7y agoWhy isn’t I in the second table?
- brokencube 7y agoProbably to prevent confusion with "1"
- _0ffh 7y agoCommonly it's to prevent confusion with "J". A confusion with a number when only letters are expected in that place is unlikely.
- aasasd 7y agoSo it was set to stun, not to kill?
- mikhailfranco 7y agoI am surprised with the talk about optical visibility. Are there no radars deployed for scanning the skies?
- scarhill 7y agoBecause these objects are moving fast, you would need to look a long way out. Long range radar is hard because the inverse square law applies in both directions, so you need 16x the power to double the range.
- mikhailfranco 7y agoMaybe a solar powered array on the dark side of the Moon, to restrict any interference from Earth systems, and you get a nice sweep of the ecliptic for free.
- known 7y agoDoesn't it vindicate the we need to weaponize space?
- skyfaller 7y agoNot really, because space weapons inevitably lead to at the very least space weapons testing, and most likely space combat. Space combat creates space junk, which prevents us from going to space in the future, which prevents us from detecting and deflecting asteroids. You might think "well, we just need to find ways to destroy space junk" but unfortunately (almost?) all tools useful for destroying space junk can also be used to destroy perfectly functional objects in space, and therefore count as space weapons, which lead to space junk...
- jmiskovic 7y agoSir Arthur Clarke describes the impact itself nicely in Rama intro: https://youtu.be/yMPA25SGlpA?t=88 https://youtu.be/yMPA25SGlpA?t=88 As I understand, the mayor threat is the dust which doesn't settle for many months. This could starve world's population and pose a major existential risk. Maybe we can use our spy satellite network and just turn all sensors outwards?
- AtomicOrbital 7y agoduplicate thread see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537941
- hnsocks 7y agoWe have Realtime stocks, sport etc.. but no real threat info ?? Why in earth this is possible ?