Close call

[Jedi Master Carr]

Anybody hear about that Asteroid that came withing 300,000 miles of hiting the earth astromoners are calling a near miss. They only knew about it coming this way in Mid December which is the scary part. Now from what I understand it was a small one (it would only have destroyed a country the size of France according to one British Astronomer:p) but still shouldn't they be watching the skies a little better if a bigger one came along and hit humanity would be gone. Now I am not too worried about it because I have no control over it but if one did I guess we would have to call upon Hollywood to build the ship to destroy it (we have had two recent movies about such an event):p

[Jedieb]

An asteroid capable of destroying France! Why is that a BAD thing? :D

[JMK]

Because Laetitia Casta is probably there!

[darth_mcbain]

Didn't hear about that... I don't think we should be so quick to jump on astronomers and say they should be watching the skies better. The galaxy (hell, the solar system) is a BIG place and there are literally millions of pieces of space junk floating around out there in the form of comets, asteroids and other debris. It is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack to be able to pinpoint every one of them.

[ReaperFett]

had it hit LONDON, it would have destroyed most of France and sunk Britian. Had it hit the sea, it could have took Europe out. Had it hit the sea of the US East coast, you might have found beaches in Colorado

[Jedi Master Carr]

Man we could have had our own Deep Impact:rolleyes I just had to say it. If an Astreoid or comet came this way I don't think it would take Robert Duval and Bruce Willis to save us, so I guess really there is nothing we can do but hope that they keep missing us.

[Darth23]

Technologically, I think it would be pretty easy to make it miss, if we had enough lead time - or were more prepared.

You don't have to destroy it, just movie it off it's path a little, and with very long distances, a tiny change makes a big difference.

[ReaperFett]

considering we didnt see it coming, Id love to know how wed hit it :)


And Armageddon is actually spot on about this stuff, they did a lot of research in that area. So much so that a scientist tried to sue them for taking his idea

[Jedieb]

Was it that research that told them to arm the rovers with gattling guns? ;)

[ReaperFett]

no, that was because they wanted Steve Buscemi :)

[Jedieb]

Steve Buscemi and a gattling gun on an asteroid hurtling towards the Earth? You don't need research to tell you that's an extra $50M at the box office right there!:D

[Master Yoghurt]

Part of the problem is the lack of resources put into mapping and locating these asteroids. One should think such would be high priority, but no.

[ReaperFett]

As Billy-Bob says, it's a big-ass sky :)

[Champion of the Force]

Part of the problem is the lack of resources put into mapping and locating these asteroids. One should think such would be high priority, but no.
Tis true unfortunately.

I read a news report last year which quoted an astronomer saying we were only aware of around 5% of the asteroids that could cross Earth's path around the sun.

The problem is that those 5% aren't the worry - it's the remaining 95% that we don't know about that are of concern. :\

[JMK]

I think I heard that at any given time, only 2% of the skies can be monitored for these things. That seems ridiculously low, but I swear that's what I heard.

Do you think the general public would find out if an asteroid was to hit the earth, or would gov'ts keep it a secret until there was a big dark spot in the sky? Kinda like in Deep Impact, crap movie as it was, it did make an interesting plot line there. Or was it Armageddon?

[Jedi Master Carr]

That was in Armagenddon I believe, in Deep Impact they find out a year before it would hit, Tea Leoni's character is about to leak part of it and so the President played by Freeman annouces it to the world. I thought that was okay and actually I liked it better than Armagenddon probably because I saw it first and that is probably the only reason.

[ReaperFett]

Deep Impact was iffy

Armageddon was class. Very funny, fun and Buscemi-ised :)

[Mu Satach]

Originally posted by JMK
I think I heard that at any given time, only 2% of the skies can be monitored for these things. That seems ridiculously low, but I swear that's what I heard.


That's about right. The reason is funding. There's not enough money to monitor the sky. Even NASA is always under tight money constraints.

[darth_mcbain]

Well considering how big the Universe is, two percent is nothing to sneeze at... I guess I'd like to know what they mean by "the skies"? Does that mean the Universe, the Galaxy, the Solar System, the space immediately surrounding Earth? Depending on their interpretation, 2% could either be a good statistic or a pretty lousy statistic.

By the way, the Moon is only about 400,000 km from the Earth, and this asteroid was a little less than 600,000 km from Earth (at least according to the report I read), so that gives a little perspective as to how close it actually was...