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Posted

Let me know about it if we make it to Christmas this year. I'm rooting for the myans I don't want to buy.Xmas gifts and drink eggnog

 

What??? We'll be drinking eggnog in June just in case we don't make it to Christmas.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

I wonder if NASA will still be in existance in 2040?

 

Yeah...but it'll have been 20 years since they had a space launch. Instead, they'll be spending all their time making Muslims feel good about themselves.

  • 1 month later...
Posted (edited)

Thought this article was fairly interesting with respect to how often asteroids zip by the earth at distances less than the average distance to the moon (i.e., less than 238,000 miles):

 

http://news.yahoo.com/bus-size-asteroid-zips-close-earth-184131023.html

 

But those asteroids are all lightweights compared to 2005 YU55, a city-block-size space rock that came within 202,000 miles (325,000 km) of Earth last November. At 1,300 feet (400 m) wide, 2005 YU55 was the biggest asteroid to come so close to our planet since 1976, researchers said.

 

Might be old news to people who follow this stuff, but I never realized just how "near" some of these near-earth asteroids routinely orbit.

 

Makes me curious about the longest known time period it takes for an asteroid to complete one full orbit. Anybody know what that time is?

 

If it's longer than man has been in space, you have to wonder if there are non-trivial earth impact probabilities that we just don't know about yet.

 

Edit: Did a little more digging, and found a story about a 150 foot wide asteroid that wasn't discovered until 2010, and has an 88 year orbit:

 

http://www.space.com/9205-potentially-hazardous-asteroid-earth-4-million-miles.html

Edited by ICanSleepWhenI'mDead
Posted

He's overstating the threat - because that's his job, so I don't much blame him.

 

And the planning for a deflection mission is on its own a useful exercise. We'll need it some day, may as well work some of the bugs out of the process now.

Turns out there's a lot I don't know about asteroid deflection planning:

 

From http://www.space.com/9571-tiny-asteroid-buzzed-earth-fast-spinning-rock.html

 

The U.S. space agency also plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 under a space plan ordered by President Obama. Such a mission could help scientists better understand the makeup of asteroids and to determine better means of deflecting them before they pose a threat to Earth, agency officials have said.
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