Asteroids hit the Earth. It’s an eventual reality, and one with which we must deal.
But we have to know where they are in the first place. That’s not so easy: they are moving targets, and they have to be observed over a period of time to nail down the orbit. Even when the orbit is determined, small errors in the position (due to atmospheric turbulence messing up the observations, tiny errors in measurements just from statistics, and so on) can add up to large uncertainties in the position of a rock over time.
One such asteroid was found in September 1960, but the orbit wasn’t well-determined, and the object was lost. It appears now that it’s been found again! Object 2007 RR9′s orbit matches what was known about an object once called 6344 P-L, and it’s thought that these two are, in fact, one and the same object.
It appears to be more like a burned out comet nucleus than a standard rocky asteroid. It’s not precisely clear from the press release, but it’s implied that the orbit is similar to that of a meteor shower called the Gamma Piscids, which occur in October and November. Meteor showers are associated with comets, which may be why they’re saying this is a dead comet and not an asteroid. Also, there is a number called the Tisserand parameter, which is associated with objects that undergo gravitational encounters with planets. Comets and asteroids tend to have different Tisserand parameters, and this object seems to fit in better with comets.
The rock — whatever the heck it is — has a 4.7 year orbit that takes it out near Jupiter, then back in. It crosses the Earth’s orbit, making it a potential impactor. It won’t hit us any time soon, but it will pass the Earth on November 7th at a distance of about 6 million miles. Close, but not too close. Don’t expect to see it, though: at a magnitude of 18 or so it’s 0.00002 times as bright as the faintest star you can see with your eye. You’d need a pretty good ‘scope to see it at all.
This is all very cool. You may note that I am writing a book about astronomical events that can wipe out life on Earth, so I follow this sort of thing carefully (I would anyway, because it’s cool). I’m glad that astronomers are out there looking for these things, and that we’re smart enough to be able to work out their trajectories.
Now, if only our government were smart enough to fund this research better…
October 4th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I personally think that the wellbeing of this planet depends on knowing what rocks are out there, potentially playing chicken with our much larger rock.
There ought to be more funding, that’s for certain.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
I wonder if we could piggyback a robot on it to someplace useful. ~3 years to Jupiter orbit ain’t bad. Of course, the advantages of getting your velocity smacked upwards by a giant rock might be outweighed by the disadvantages of getting smacked by a giant rock. And then the trajectory might not go anywhere worth going, and once you’re on that ride, the whole point is almost negated if you have to carry enough fuel to get off.
I guess that’s not such a good idea unless the thing is headed towards something cool. Boo.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
As a serious inquiry, if we had detected that this object would impact the earth, and assuming Bruce Willis wasn’t available, what, if anything, could we actually do about it?
October 4th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
On a lighter note, I think it’d be hilarious and highly irresponsible if we came up with “cheap” ways to move small space rocks in whatever direction we pleased. By hilarious, I mean just for fun, start ejecting some from the Solar system. Other civilizations who happen to have mastered interstellar flight would be thinking “what the… why are there so many asteroids hurling out into interstellar space, coming from that star? Who do they think they are?”
Hurling one towards Mars and observing the impact up close with one of our orbiters would be fun. Actually now that I think about it, the idea of hurling a rock at Mars isn’t such a bad idea (unless you happen to live there). In the spirit of planetary geology, it’d give us a FRESH crater to investigate.
October 4th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Selina– check these guys out: The B612 Foundation.
October 4th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Dr. Phil.
Are you serious with this B612 malarchy?
“It makes the key assumption, well supported by statistics and common sense that we will know of a pending impact many years ahead of time.”
Excuse me. Have we not just this year found 2007 RR9 again? OK, it will miss us, but it might not have done.
Not really sat down and crunched the numbers, but I worry that:-
a) It is nowehere near as straightforward as the website suggests (no idea what mechanism they are proposing for attaching to the asteroid/comet. Manned or unmanned? Delivery craft (particularly if the shuttle fleet will be obsolete by then)
b) Why is this not being looked at as a united venture – i.e. with many countries supporting it, instead of being an, essentially, private venture?
You posted this as a joke didn’t you?
October 4th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
So will this particular coment/rock/whatever-it-is-thingamajigy make it into your book?
And it does seem that a potential asteroid or comet hit would be something that all nations should look at other than just the United States, but it would help if the United States in fact looked into funding for this research to begin with!
October 4th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Well, it seems obvious to me that it would be unmanned. Depending on how much time is avaliable, I suppose that the effort could be an enormous undertaking. Then again, with a decade or more lead time it would be very doable.
I’m all about the nuclear option. The “Gentle” means of pushing it away with giant sails or “gravity tractors” are just not as realistic. If you want to save the earth from something like an asteroid, I’d want to hit it with the damned most powerful thing we have. I’m not worried about pushing it “too far away from earth”
Not a nuke to blow the thing up. No, that won’t work unless it’s absolutely tiny. You want to saturate one side with radiation enough to push it well off course, hence a standoff nuclear blast.
The mark 83 is a relatively small warhead and can do one megaton+. I’d suggest sending up a few. If the first one does not push it off far enough or turns out to not work at all, you have more. The first you’d be conservative with, to gage the effect.
The ideal warhead would be the one from the Spartan interceptor. Designed to work outside the atmosphere and five megatons with a design that created huge amounts of high energy X-rays.
Unfortionately, those are long dismantled. However, with enough time, that design might be ideal.
I have heard that some asteroids might not lend themselves to the explosive redirection approach because they are of low density and could absorb much of the energy. I still think multiple standoffs is the best option.
Sometimes the “Quick and dirty” and “Non-elegant brute force” are the most reliable way. It’s simple, and hence it’s more likely to work.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
*sigh* What’s the bet that some idiots will start claiming that this comet *is* going to hit Earth this time around?
October 4th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Selina I don’t think he meant it as a joke. It has been calculated that your chances of getting hit by an comet are about the same as dying in an airplane crash. The way this works is that evey now and again statisiticaly a really big one will hit and get rid of lots of people.
I think on average we get a small impact (enough to destroy a town) about every 100 years, and the last one was something like 1908.
Makes you think….
October 4th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
“It’s an eventual reality, and one with which we must deal.”
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Selina, do you have a link for that quotation?
The B612 Foundation has a pretty impressive list of people working on it, including Rusty Schweikart (Apollo 9), Ed Lu, and Dan Durda. These guys have spent a LOT of time thinking about this stuff.
Anyway, the point is that of course we can get blindsided, but there’s not much you can do about those unless and until we have better coverage of the sky. Since there’s nothing to be done about that now the way things are, then it’s OK to make the assumption that you have some time. Look up Apophis, for example.
October 4th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
You may note that I am writing a book about astronomical events that can wipe out life on Earth
Cool, Phil! I look foreward to when it’s released; have you read – and if so, what did you think of – Niven and Pournelle’s _Lucifer’s Hammer_?
October 5th, 2007 at 12:52 am
Dr. Plait,
Were you going to give us a link to a press release?
October 5th, 2007 at 1:26 am
The quotation is from the second paragraph of the “Proposed Solution” on their website http://www.b612foundation.org/info/solution.html
It just seemed to be a sweeping generalisation to claim we’ll have decades especially in the light of this objects recent re-discovery.
I must admit, I did read the site fairly thorouhly and noted the presence of such illuminati as Schweikart et al. One would hope that they had some idea what was involved. However, it does seem to be predicated on a slightly dodgy premise – that we’ll have plenty of time to sort it out.
Not that I’m saying they should stop their work, indeed, it may well be that we will have many years to sort such a problem out – but it’s not a guarentee.
Sailor, I’m not sure on the probability of being killed by a comet being the same as in an aeroplane crash. Many people die in aircraft each year but not many deaths due to cometry impact are recorded (as far as I know). Mind you, probability is an incredibly manipulative thing. Apparently the chances of you being on an aircraft with a bomb on board are 1 in 10000. The probability of there being two independant bombs on board are 1 in 10,000,000. So the safest bet is to take your own bomb with you.
drbuzz0. I was not thinking that the mission would be permanently manned but would possibly use a manned mission to set up whatever deflecting device was to be used which would be left behind with the manned mission returning.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:04 am
“I was not thinking that the mission would be permanently manned but would possibly use a manned mission to set up whatever deflecting device was to be used which would be left behind with the manned mission returning.”
Thats a fantastic idea! We could just load a couple of drilling platforms into the bays of space shuttles, send them up to the asteroid where they could land and race to dig to 800 feet. Whoever gets there first gets to place thier “nukular” bomb, they all get out and blow the thing right out of the sky!
or not…
I remember reading somewhere, it might even have been here in the BA’s blog, that in order to avoid an asteroid or commetary impact we would only have to spped the thing up or slow it down a minute amount. If we catch the thing a few years in advance a solar sail or a sufficiently massive blast could be enough to give the rock the extra momentum it needs to beat us to the impact point thereby missing us completely for at least one more trip around the sun.
October 5th, 2007 at 4:16 am
Phil, please post a link to the press release. I don’t see anything about it on the normal JPL NEO website, referenced in here. Until I see the statistics and how they compare to other rocks there I’ll treat any claims skeptically.
For everyone else interested in some background, I’ve been following the NEO threat fairly closely as it’s developed over time. For a list of NEOs found so far (it’s pretty big), check this list:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
(Note that RR9 is not on it yet)
Take a look at the Torino scale rating on these rocks, as well as the Palermo. Torinos above 1 are unusual (1 asteroid reached 4) and Palermos above 0 are unusual.
There’s a lot of statistics involved in this work, which I’m sure Phil will give proper treatment in his book. There are a lot of rocks out there that, given a quick first glance, come darn close to us. If you want to see that list, go to this page and sort by MOID (Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance):
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_elem
You’ll see a lot of very small numbers such as 0.000002, but that is expressed in AU, so even that small number times the Earth-Sun distance remains small.
The B612 foundation has been holding NASA’s and Congress’ feet to the fire about this stuff. When NASA’s public version of the NEO threat report came out, they pressed to get the full version released (both versions can be found here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report2007.html). B612′s members are knowledgable, and the fact that we’ve found thousands of these rocks without one headed directly for us reinforces their claim. I think they’re a little stuck on their ‘gravitational tractor’ approach to adjusting an asteroid’s course, though, which requires the decades of lead time they talk about. There’s more to discover, however, especially a troubling subset of asteroids that spend most of their time inside our orbit.
October 5th, 2007 at 4:23 am
Found it! RR9 was removed from the list of potential impactors on Sep 13th.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/removed.html
I think Phil’s focus in this post was how these objects can be lost and rediscovered. Cool stuff.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Scott,
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not the one who’s thought up these ideas. I was simply responding to someone stating that it would have to be unmanned. Again, I’m not convinced that the idea of dragging an asteroid/comet is really feasible – and from what I’ve read blowing it into smithereens is not an option either.
I was only wondering what, if anything, could we really do if we discovered one of these objects was on a collision course with the earth. I suspect the answer is not a lot.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:34 am
Olive:
The problem with that idea is that you’d have to get your robotic lander thingy into roughly the same trajectory and velocity to begin with to get it to “piggyback” on the rock without the rock smashing it to pieces.
In other words, the maximum amount of energy the rock can lend to the robot is based on the maximum velocity at which the rock can hit the robot without destroying it. That amount of energy is negligible compared to the amount of energy it would take to get the robot near the rock in the first place.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Phil, you have never led me astray in the past, but just in case, I have started digging a bunker… How deep do you think it needs to be to survive?
More seriously, I remember NASA landing one of their spacecraft on an asteroid after the mission was complete just to see if they could. They orbited the thing for a couple of days and then landed on it. So, it seems we wouldn’t have much work to do to get to the rock, only how we deal with it once we get there.
Does anyone have a link or info on this or have I smoked my socks??
October 5th, 2007 at 10:56 am
I believe the British government ran a study a few years back using the actuarial method…assuming x as the possibility of a major impact, y as the potential damage and loss of life, and z as the required investment in the long-term to minimize y, etc… What I think they came up with was a long-term investment of one billion pounds per year (for both detection and countermeasures) being a worthwhile funding level to develop a truly effective “Space Guard” system that would protect us from larger bodies.
Of course, most governments (and most individuals, for that matter) wouldn’t see an expenditure of this magnitude (roughly equalling the US Gov’s annual spending on paperclips, I would think!) as worthwhile…at least NOT until a 4-kilometer-diameter comet remnant sets it’s sights on the central Pacific Ocean.
Many of us spend a sizeable portion of our annual earnings on health and life insurance; doesn’t it make sense to make a similar comittment toward
the survival of our species and societies?
October 5th, 2007 at 11:01 am
[...] Potential impacting asteroid found after being lost at the 1960’s no Bad Astronomy [...]
October 6th, 2007 at 8:24 am
# scienceteacherinexileon 05 Oct 2007 at 7:22 am wrote :
“Phil, you have never led me astray in the past, but just in case, I have started digging a bunker… How deep do you think it needs to be to survive? More seriously, I remember NASA landing one of their spacecraft on an asteroid after the mission was complete just to see if they could. They orbited the thing for a couple of days and then landed on it. So, it seems we wouldn’t have much work to do to get to the rock, only how we deal with it once we get there. Does anyone have a link or info on this or have I smoked my socks??”
SCR : Eros was the asteroid in question & the probe (JPL-NASA) was called NEAR – later renamed for astrogeologist and crater expert Eugene Shoemaker whose ashes, incidentally, have ended up on the moon.
The NEAR-Shoemaker probe flew past the very porous asteroid Mathilde then orbited and mapped the sizeable near-earth asteroid Eros. At the end of the mission with very low fuel they landed NEAR on the asteroid where as far I know it still remains.
They’d have a website but unsure how to put links in here so probably easiest just to search NEAR, Shoemaker, Eros (ok maybe NOT Eros!) or variants or go via NASA home & then missions page.
As for survival well the bunker would probably be okay – your body however may be a different story!
Apparently one idea is that, given enough time and distance away, an asteroid can simply be pianted white (or reflective silver – whatever) on one side. The pressure of the solar wind wll then – gradually but constantly – alter the path of the asteroid away from Earth.
I tend to think nukes in space is a bit of a bad idea and the number of bombs up there is already high enough without needing more to worry about. Mind you an asteroid /comet on collision course now could give us all a good change of focus and energy; away from the current miserable quagmire of America invading anyone it (or Israel, more like) cares to, in the quest for “full spectrum dominace” (or tyrannical global rule).
As long as we did have enough time to focus on & actually do something about it, a threateneing comet /asteroid _could_ be just the kick in the pants our species needs ..
Yes, it is a real threat (unlike, arguably, the much exaggerated & much exploited “terrorism” hoopla & poor excuse for poorer thinking*) & absolutely we should be putting money, time and effort into combatting that rather than carrying on digging ourselves further into a mess in Iraq and the South-West Asian -Islamic region generally.
———————————————————–
* I know, I know September 11th, September 11th, Sept. 11th – TWO THOUSAND AND ONE. Folks, perspective please, that was one attack nearly ten years ago and, callous, as this may sound, it was only two skyscrapers destroyed and 2000 odd lives lost. Since then, the USA has taken out two whole nations and killed about perhaps 200,000 people. Many nations have endured far worse – Iraq & Afghanistan to name two, Iran with the earthquake that destroyed Bam and killed 30,000 individuals for another. Time to say, enough and put 11-Sept-2001 and the “war of terror” into the past. Amercia needs to stop using September 11th _2001_ as an excuse and start behaving responsibly : No more invading nations that had nothing to do with it, no more repressive measures excused by paranoia about some demented criminal nut who probably died in cave last year anyway …
.. & for pity’s sake impeach Bush & Cheney before they invade Iran and harm everyone on the planet yet more!
October 6th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Selina Morse wrote :
“Sailor, I’m not sure on the probability of being killed by a comet being the same as in an aeroplane crash. Many people die in aircraft each year but not many deaths due to cometry impact are recorded (as far as I know). Mind you, probability is an incredibly manipulative thing. Apparently the chances of you being on an aircraft with a bomb on board are 1 in 10000. The probability of there being two independant bombs on board are 1 in 10,000,000. So the safest bet is to take your own bomb with you.”
Yep, that’d be a sure-fire way of getting kicked off the flight and thus placed in no danger at all…
… Except from over-zealous trigger-happy security guards & CIA torturers of course!
October 6th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
StevoR
“So the safest bet is to take your own bomb with you.â€
That’s what’s known as the British sense of humour. Sorry it doesn’t always travel that well.
October 6th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Nah, got that youwere joking … just thought I’d point out how itwuldmaker you even safer.
October 6th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
one sentence – & I still get typos … Sigh. Corrected version :
Nah, got that youwere joking … just thought I’d point out how it would make you even safer. Or not.
October 7th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Geez. Calm down. I just *borrowed* it for a while.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:04 am
[...] Bad Astronomy Blog » Potential impacting asteroid found after being lost in the 1960s Tags: asteroid, comet nucleus, earth impactor, missing, [...]
October 18th, 2007 at 8:21 am
More detail on this story can be found here, a space.com article written by the guy involved:
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/071018-seti-lostasteroid.html
November 28th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Theres asteroid being used for a ship to alpha centauri in the novel series by Abdul Ahad (First Ark)-
http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ahad/earth-ring.htm