6 ms·

Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday

112 points by whycome 2y ago

metadat 2y ago
Was funding for the Asteroid Watch program drastically reduced, or why did the detection come in so late? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch
- burnte 2y ago
  The sky is really big. No detection will ever be 100%.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Your application for a tourist visa to the Earth Planetary Visitor's Bureau has been denied due to a clerical error. Please alter your course to enter a holding orbit until your application has been resubmitted. We thank you in your interest in visiting Earth.
  - jfoutz 2y ago
    For various reasons Armageddon is one of my favorite movies. Action/comedy, not exactly _good_ but I find it enjoyable. I bring it up because of the Fictional mission commander talking to the president, > Begging your pardon sir, but its a big ass sky.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      The best thing about Armageddon for me are open flames in vacuum.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- iam-TJ 2y ago
  I'm confused about the late warning quote because the data page for MK2024 shows the first observation for the orbit fit was 2024-05-07. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%20MK&view=VOP https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...
  - dylan604 2y ago
    So even if they announced on the day of the first observation, that's not really much notice to do anything about it other than start prepping for accepting of loss of life. I would seriously hope it took some amount of time for other people to verify/validate trajectory than the first person that observes it. At this point, we're still at the point of needing years if not decades notice for us to even have a chance of actually protecting from an impact in a meaningful way.
    - prewett 2y ago
      I figure we could get a Falcon Heavy filled with rocks or something launched in a hurry. But, I did the math, and like you say, all we could do is watch. Assuming the standard asteroid density of 2000 kg/m^3 [1], a 260 m diameter asteroid has a volume of 4/3 * pi * 130^3 = 1.84e10 m^3. Falcon Heavy can lift 16818 kg to a transfer orbit to Mars [2], which I assume is basically what it can do to reach an asteroid coming at us. A normal speed of space probes (without gravity assists) seems to be about 25,000 mph = 11600 m/s. Thus, it has a momentum of about 1.95e8 kg*m/s. Assuming we hit the asteroid perpendicular to its motion, transferring all our momentum into transverse velocity, that is 1.95e8 / 1.84e10, or approximately 0.01 m/s. To ensure a miss, it would need to travel the whole diameter of the earth, 6.378e6 m, which would take 6.378e8 seconds, or about 20.2 years, which is the amount of time before impact we would need to hit the asteroid. We would probably have more success hitting it head on. Since the earth is moving at about 3e4 m/s, we only need to delay the asteroid by 213 seconds. The minimum speed of an asteroid impacting Earth is 1.1e4 m/s, so we would need to move it backwards 2.343e6 m. This allows us to hit it slightly later, only 7.3 years ahead of time (in the best-case scenario). Assuming it could vary by a factor of two, we would need up to about a 14 year lead time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_cha... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event
- whycome 2y ago
  Because they had to time the asteroid to show up for World Asteroid Day obviously. https://asteroidday.org/about/ https://asteroidday.org/about/ (June 30th, since 2014)
phkahler 2y ago
"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," I've said this before. The way they find these things is looking for movement against the distant background / starfield. That works pretty well for finding things, but there is one problem. Any object on a collision course with earth will NOT be moving across the background in the days leading up to the collision. It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame. Another way to model it is to think of firing a projectile from earth into deep space and see how that tracks against the background. That'd be the reverse scenario and there will be no relative motion until it's far enough to not get the same influence from the sun.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  One more reason for deep space telescopes. A PHA about to impact will not have much movement in relation to the background stars when seen from Earth, but will be moving when seen from a different vantage point.
- kemiller 2y ago
  Sounds like we need a monitoring station on Mars.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  >It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame. I dont think that is true aside from the case where the asteroid vector is the exact opposite of the earth. Even if the earth and the asteroid are in the same accelerating reference plane, the background is not. If you have two race cars going in around a track and at one from the other, it still appears to be moving relative to the stands.
  - mike_d 2y ago
jfengel 2y ago
How large? "anywhere from 120 metres to 260 metres in diameter". Is that bad? According to NASA, "If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area. We believe anything larger than one to two kilometers (one kilometer is a little more than one-half mile) could have worldwide effects." So... it would really suck if it hit a populated area, though that's unlikely.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I'm surprised there's no TNT equivalent comparing it to the biggest weapons humans have created. That always seems like a data point used when showing destructive forces.
  - biot 2y ago
    From the article: > "This is a big object. An object of this size is going to have the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Brown said. "That'd be a regional impact. It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world."
    - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
      Not very comfortable with how much that sounds like downplaying the effects. It would be the largest disaster in all of human history. For reference the estimated strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States is about 820 megatons and the largest US test detonation was 15 megatons so an impact of this size would be on par with or possibly worse than an all out nuclear war between the US and Russia. God knows what kind of effects that kind of blast would have, it would probably kill half the US population on impact and light the entire east coast on fire. No idea what would happen to the rest of the world after that but the supply chain “disruption” alone would mean millions starving and without fuel or medicine.
rich_sasha 2y ago
My physics might be wrong, but with Earth's radius at 6500km and Lunar orbit radius around 350,000km, probability of a collision course given asteroid being within a lunar orbit distance is only (6.5/350)^2 or 0.03%, or maybe even cleaner, 1 in 3000. So it's not that close a miss.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  In terms of these things, its a hair's breadth, but in human terms it's incredibly distant. We don't have a great intuition about just how enormous and empty space is, how much of the universe (including our little patch) is just a seething void.
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    It's not about intuition, it's about probability of impact. All these articles talking about asteroids flying within a lunar orbit distance make it sound like we got away lucky. But that's still far, far away, and the chances of impact are quite remote, in absolute terms.
- throwthrowuknow 2y ago
  Cool but what’s its orbital period and how does this close pass effect future crossings?
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    Presumably irrelevant since we didn't care about the previous crossing.
    - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
      We just discovered it, how could we know about the previous ones?
philsnow 2y ago
I recall that Google has a library that will answer the question, "given two identifiers like cluster names or machine names, which failure domains do they share?". Those failure domains can be like "they're in the same rack", "they share a power bus", "they're in the same physical building", "they're in the same geographical region", that kind of thing. I wonder if it has since been updated to account for different disaster scenarios. It would be good to know, if you're storing 5 redundant copies of something critical, that all 5 copies won't be under 10 feet of water if an asteroid strikes one of the poles and melts all that pole's ice. I can't imagine what data would be so critical that it's important to make sure it survives such an event, but that hasn't stopped googlers over-engineering internal things in the past.
- pigscantfly 2y ago
  The LOCKSS [1] digital preservation threat model (I've been told, there's a whitepaper if curious) considers nuclear first strikes and large solar storms -- they maintain a global network of servers for archiving and preserving academic research. [1] https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss
adamredwoods 2y ago
The biggest takeaway is that a former Queen member turned astrophysicist, Brian May. Rock on! >> Asteroid Day, sanctioned by the United Nations, was started in 2014 by astrophysicist and former Queen musician Brian May along with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart along with a few others. The goal is to inform the public about asteroids and their potential threats as well as calling on governments to work on asteroid detection programs.
FerretFred 2y ago
"Don't Look Up"... tut.. yet another SciFi movie that looks to be turning into real life sigh
nick_ 2y ago
The moments spent crunching the numbers that say if it's going to hit us must be pretty intense.
dard 2y ago
I work on the NEO Surveyor space telescope, doing orbit simulations of asteroids/comets and predicting expected observations of objects like these. If you look: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=%E2%9C%93&object_id=2024+MK https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8... You will see this was actually spotted back in 2014, but only seen for a few days. When an object is only observed for a few days we generally cannot compute an orbit for it, there is just not enough data to pin it down. However during this current pass of it (the last time it will come by for at least a few centuries), we have enough observations to pin its orbit down. Note that a lot of this is automated nowadays, with automatic observation and "interesting" objects being flagged automatically. There are a lot of small rocks up there (sub 100m).

112 points by whycome 2y ago

Was funding for the Asteroid Watch program drastically reduced, or why did the detection come in so late? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch

burnte 2y ago
The sky is really big. No detection will ever be 100%.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Your application for a tourist visa to the Earth Planetary Visitor's Bureau has been denied due to a clerical error. Please alter your course to enter a holding orbit until your application has been resubmitted. We thank you in your interest in visiting Earth.
- jfoutz 2y ago
  For various reasons Armageddon is one of my favorite movies. Action/comedy, not exactly _good_ but I find it enjoyable. I bring it up because of the Fictional mission commander talking to the president, > Begging your pardon sir, but its a big ass sky.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    The best thing about Armageddon for me are open flames in vacuum.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
iam-TJ 2y ago
I'm confused about the late warning quote because the data page for MK2024 shows the first observation for the orbit fit was 2024-05-07. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%20MK&view=VOP https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...
- dylan604 2y ago
  So even if they announced on the day of the first observation, that's not really much notice to do anything about it other than start prepping for accepting of loss of life. I would seriously hope it took some amount of time for other people to verify/validate trajectory than the first person that observes it. At this point, we're still at the point of needing years if not decades notice for us to even have a chance of actually protecting from an impact in a meaningful way.
  - prewett 2y ago
    I figure we could get a Falcon Heavy filled with rocks or something launched in a hurry. But, I did the math, and like you say, all we could do is watch. Assuming the standard asteroid density of 2000 kg/m^3 [1], a 260 m diameter asteroid has a volume of 4/3 * pi * 130^3 = 1.84e10 m^3. Falcon Heavy can lift 16818 kg to a transfer orbit to Mars [2], which I assume is basically what it can do to reach an asteroid coming at us. A normal speed of space probes (without gravity assists) seems to be about 25,000 mph = 11600 m/s. Thus, it has a momentum of about 1.95e8 kg*m/s. Assuming we hit the asteroid perpendicular to its motion, transferring all our momentum into transverse velocity, that is 1.95e8 / 1.84e10, or approximately 0.01 m/s. To ensure a miss, it would need to travel the whole diameter of the earth, 6.378e6 m, which would take 6.378e8 seconds, or about 20.2 years, which is the amount of time before impact we would need to hit the asteroid. We would probably have more success hitting it head on. Since the earth is moving at about 3e4 m/s, we only need to delay the asteroid by 213 seconds. The minimum speed of an asteroid impacting Earth is 1.1e4 m/s, so we would need to move it backwards 2.343e6 m. This allows us to hit it slightly later, only 7.3 years ahead of time (in the best-case scenario). Assuming it could vary by a factor of two, we would need up to about a 14 year lead time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_asteroid_physical_cha... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event
whycome 2y ago
Because they had to time the asteroid to show up for World Asteroid Day obviously. https://asteroidday.org/about/ https://asteroidday.org/about/ (June 30th, since 2014)

phkahler 2y ago

"Maybe the big take-home point on this one is it's a pretty big object and it was only found 10 or 12 days before closest approach," I've said this before. The way they find these things is looking for movement against the distant background / starfield. That works pretty well for finding things, but there is one problem. Any object on a collision course with earth will NOT be moving across the background in the days leading up to the collision. It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame. Another way to model it is to think of firing a projectile from earth into deep space and see how that tracks against the background. That'd be the reverse scenario and there will be no relative motion until it's far enough to not get the same influence from the sun.

rbanffy 2y ago
One more reason for deep space telescopes. A PHA about to impact will not have much movement in relation to the background stars when seen from Earth, but will be moving when seen from a different vantage point.
kemiller 2y ago
Sounds like we need a monitoring station on Mars.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
>It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame. I dont think that is true aside from the case where the asteroid vector is the exact opposite of the earth. Even if the earth and the asteroid are in the same accelerating reference plane, the background is not. If you have two race cars going in around a track and at one from the other, it still appears to be moving relative to the stands.
- mike_d 2y ago

jfengel 2y ago

How large? "anywhere from 120 metres to 260 metres in diameter". Is that bad? According to NASA, "If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area. We believe anything larger than one to two kilometers (one kilometer is a little more than one-half mile) could have worldwide effects." So... it would really suck if it hit a populated area, though that's unlikely.

dylan604 2y ago
I'm surprised there's no TNT equivalent comparing it to the biggest weapons humans have created. That always seems like a data point used when showing destructive forces.
- biot 2y ago
  From the article: > "This is a big object. An object of this size is going to have the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Brown said. "That'd be a regional impact. It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world."
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    Not very comfortable with how much that sounds like downplaying the effects. It would be the largest disaster in all of human history. For reference the estimated strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States is about 820 megatons and the largest US test detonation was 15 megatons so an impact of this size would be on par with or possibly worse than an all out nuclear war between the US and Russia. God knows what kind of effects that kind of blast would have, it would probably kill half the US population on impact and light the entire east coast on fire. No idea what would happen to the rest of the world after that but the supply chain “disruption” alone would mean millions starving and without fuel or medicine.

rich_sasha 2y ago

My physics might be wrong, but with Earth's radius at 6500km and Lunar orbit radius around 350,000km, probability of a collision course given asteroid being within a lunar orbit distance is only (6.5/350)^2 or 0.03%, or maybe even cleaner, 1 in 3000. So it's not that close a miss.

EA-3167 2y ago
In terms of these things, its a hair's breadth, but in human terms it's incredibly distant. We don't have a great intuition about just how enormous and empty space is, how much of the universe (including our little patch) is just a seething void.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  It's not about intuition, it's about probability of impact. All these articles talking about asteroids flying within a lunar orbit distance make it sound like we got away lucky. But that's still far, far away, and the chances of impact are quite remote, in absolute terms.
throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Cool but what’s its orbital period and how does this close pass effect future crossings?
- tedunangst 2y ago
  Presumably irrelevant since we didn't care about the previous crossing.
  - throwthrowuknow 2y ago
    We just discovered it, how could we know about the previous ones?

philsnow 2y ago

I recall that Google has a library that will answer the question, "given two identifiers like cluster names or machine names, which failure domains do they share?". Those failure domains can be like "they're in the same rack", "they share a power bus", "they're in the same physical building", "they're in the same geographical region", that kind of thing. I wonder if it has since been updated to account for different disaster scenarios. It would be good to know, if you're storing 5 redundant copies of something critical, that all 5 copies won't be under 10 feet of water if an asteroid strikes one of the poles and melts all that pole's ice. I can't imagine what data would be so critical that it's important to make sure it survives such an event, but that hasn't stopped googlers over-engineering internal things in the past.

pigscantfly 2y ago
The LOCKSS [1] digital preservation threat model (I've been told, there's a whitepaper if curious) considers nuclear first strikes and large solar storms -- they maintain a global network of servers for archiving and preserving academic research. [1] https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss https://www.lockss.org/why-lockss

adamredwoods 2y ago

The biggest takeaway is that a former Queen member turned astrophysicist, Brian May. Rock on! >> Asteroid Day, sanctioned by the United Nations, was started in 2014 by astrophysicist and former Queen musician Brian May along with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart along with a few others. The goal is to inform the public about asteroids and their potential threats as well as calling on governments to work on asteroid detection programs.

FerretFred 2y ago

"Don't Look Up"... tut.. yet another SciFi movie that looks to be turning into real life sigh

nick_ 2y ago

The moments spent crunching the numbers that say if it's going to hit us must be pretty intense.

dard 2y ago

I work on the NEO Surveyor space telescope, doing orbit simulations of asteroids/comets and predicting expected observations of objects like these. If you look: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=%E2%9C%93&object_id=2024+MK https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8... You will see this was actually spotted back in 2014, but only seen for a few days. When an object is only observed for a few days we generally cannot compute an orbit for it, there is just not enough data to pin it down. However during this current pass of it (the last time it will come by for at least a few centuries), we have enough observations to pin its orbit down. Note that a lot of this is automated nowadays, with automatic observation and "interesting" objects being flagged automatically. There are a lot of small rocks up there (sub 100m).