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Space Weather

We're going to be hit by an asteroid tonight. The angle is such that it will just be a spectacular fireball. But it's nice that we're finally getting to a position from which we can predict these things. The next step is to be able to prevent them, if necessary. Too bad that almost nothing that NASA is doing is contributing to that, at least with the manned spaceflight program.

 
 

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9 Comments

Tom Hill wrote:

Very cool (predicting the event, not the lack of action). I hope that there's some video of the event. It will also serve well as a test of any warning systems out there.

Ken Murphy wrote:

Does

My guess is that this is another "blindsider", coming out from the Sun so we can't see it. A good reason to get better equipment up there to start conducting a Sunward survey.

Stewart wrote:

I tried to read the article. Some flippin' ad came up and covered the first several paragraphs. Space.com needs to get its act together. Their pages have always loaded sluggishly, but this is useless.

Karl Hallowell wrote:

My guess is that this is another "blindsider", coming out from the Sun so we can't see it. A good reason to get better equipment up there to start conducting a Sunward survey.

If that were true, we probably wouldn't have seen it coming.

Ken Murphy wrote:

The part that got left out of my original post is that according to CNN we had less than 24 hours notice, leading to my clipped question "Does less than 24 hours count as predicting?"

Sounds like we didn't see it coming until it was right on top of us.

Josh Reiter wrote:

I propose that we launch space sharks with friggin' laser beams in their head into orbit. Train them to blow it up and eat the little pieces left over.

Karl Hallowell wrote:

The part that got left out of my original post is that according to CNN we had less than 24 hours notice, leading to my clipped question "Does less than 24 hours count as predicting?"

Sorry Ken, didn't see back there what you meant. What's unusual about this asteroid is its small size. We haven't been able to do that before. Less than 24 hours warning is a lot better than no warning. It means several things. First, since we can detect asteroids small enough to be harmless, we have proof that we can detect asteroids big enough to cause us harm. Second, by keeping track of the more numerous small asteroids, we can determine just how effective our asteroid detection system is. If, for example, we can detect with 24 hour warning 90% of the small asteroids that hit us every year, that means we probably will have at least that much success at spotting the more dangerous asteroids.

Tom Hill wrote:

Looks like it was unique in that it was coming from almost directly the anti-sun direction. That would put it in full illumination. This animation shows the asteroid POV:

http://orbit.psi.edu/?q=node/22

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on October 6, 2008 4:21 PM.

Space Power Beaming Concept Proof was the previous entry in this blog.

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