Giant Asteroid to Cruise Dangerously Close to Earth
About Michael John ScottMr. Scott is the owner and publisher of Mad Mike's America. He is a U.S. Army veteran, career law enforcement executive, and dog trainer. He is a university professor, and criminal justice consultant, holding several degrees, including a master's in criminal justice and human services. He has completed the requisite coursework toward his doctorate, and is still working on his dissertation.
View all posts by Michael John Scott →
A giant asteroid, big enough to flatten a city, will cruise closer to Earth than any previously observed space object its size on Feb. 15, but astronomers say there is zero chance of 2012 DA14 squishing any Earthlings this time around.
DA14 is moving towards us at 17,450 miles an hour.
(NASA)
With a 148-foot diameter and the mass of a cruise ship, the asteroid is relatively small, but still comparable to one that flattened 80 million trees in Siberia in 1908, reports the Christian Science Monitor. At its closest, it will be just 17,200 miles from Earth—closer than some satellites.
Astronomers believe objects the size of DA14 come this close to Earth roughly once every 40 years—and smash into it every 1,200 years or so—but this one wouldn’t have been spotted as recently as 20 years ago, before the search for near-Earth objects was stepped up, CNN reports. The asteroid was spotted around a year ago by a team of amateur astronomers in Spain. “Its orbit is very well-known,” a NASA expert says. “We know exactly where it’s going to go, and it cannot hit the Earth,” though there is a slightly higher but still very small chance that it could make impact when it flies by in 2110. Experts believe DA14 is made of stone instead of metal or ice, so it won’t be of interest to asteroid miners.
Follow MadMike’sAmerica on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to visit our HOME PAGE.
If you liked our story please share it at REDDIT.COM and PINTEREST as well as TUMBLR.
James Smith
February 6, 2013 at 8:25 am
Even if it were certain to collide with the earth, what could be do about it? Many ideas have been proposed, but none have been implemented or even demonstrated to be workable.
If even a very small deflection in an object’s course could be made soon enough that would work admirable. Given the distances involved. the least deviation would mean many thousands of miles by the time it approached our orbit.
Most people have no idea of the precision required in space flight. To put a lander on mars, requires delicacy in direction unimaginable to the average person. Remember, everything in space is also a moving target, too.
Jim Moore
February 6, 2013 at 12:33 pm
Responding to both Mike and James:
Preparation to address incoming is a space mission worthy of NASA. As James points out, simply intercepting an asteroid would be a huge challenge, and doing so with enough time left to execute a mission to divert it’s trajectory would require capabilities we can only dream about.
But, marketed well, convincing the world to develop this capacity might not be all that difficult, and the benefits would be enormous. This would literally be a rapid deployment mission with several facets:
~ Reasonably quick launch of the intercept vehicle;
~ Said intercept vehicle would need a lifting capacity large enough to carry a huge payload of engines capable of altering the orbit of the threat;
~ The human team conducting the mission would need life support and radiation protection systems comparable to those on the orbiting space station.
I would imagine such a mission would be based at the space station. The intercept vehicle and utility engines would need to be lifted in pieces and assembled in space. Furthermore, all these systems would need to be created in multiples to enable testing and to be exploited for secondary missions.
But all of this has enormous appeal, because the task itself is vital to earth safety and human survival, and the collateral benefits of the undertaking will be vast–well beyond what we can imagine. Trickle-down from past space flight endeavors is nearly immeasurable.
Human missions to Mars are still too ambitious considering the cost/benefit analysis. Robots do a fine job on Mars. But an asteroid intercept and diversion mission strategy would be equally ambitious (and could easily place humans on Mars) while being far more convincing as an investment. Human oversight on the scene of an asteroid intercept mission is essential for any number of reasons, while human oversight of interplanetary exploration is far less essential.
James Smith
February 6, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Well done. (But what else can we expect from someone named “Jim”?)
The largest obstacle I can see is getting governments and people from many nations to agree and cooperate on a project this massive. Getting three or four friends to agree on where to have lunch is hard enough.
Michael John Scott
February 6, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Great information. Thanks so much Jim.