It looks like Mars dodged a bullet. Well, an asteroid.
2007 WD5 will miss the Red Planet on January 30, just like most of us assumed it would. Even at best, it had a 4% chance of an impact, but now it’s very clear it’ll miss. The JPL NEO website even has a cool animation showing how the best estimates of the asteroid position have increased in accuracy over the past few weeks, and now Mars is well outside the region where the asteroid will be. Or vice versa. Whatever.
Anyway, too bad. It would’ve been cool to see it get smacked.
January 12th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Hey Phil, I was going to search to see if you’ve written about something (missed it if you have), but your search is blocked by an oversized Aloha Airlines ad…
Anyway, the thing I was searching for was the big telescope partially funded by Bill Gates that will be able to map the entire sky in just a few days. Supposedly it will make finding NEO’s much easier.
http://www.lsst.org/lsst_home.shtml
January 12th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Of course, after I post the comment, the offending ad is cycled out
January 12th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Maxwell_Smart
Rats. Missed it by *that* much.
/Maxwell_Smart
January 12th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
For a split second I saw your headline and assumed a notion that they’d discovered a bunch more oxygen somewhere on Mars, (therefore “safe” for future humans) – but then realized it was about 2007 WD5 missing the Red Planet. Looks like we’ll still have to bring our own air.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Too bad about this. I would’ve loved to have seen the rising cloud of dust imaged by one of the Mars rover’s. That would make front page headlines!
January 12th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Yeah, we definitely need to get started working on an asteroid gravity tractor or whatever and see if we can nudge a near miss into a direct hit on Mars. It’d be good field testing of asteroid defense for Earth, and we’d get all the data from an impact with the red planet. Better luck next time. (Also, technically, the chances of a collision were always 0%, but we didn’t have enough data on the path of WD5 to determine that until now. Booooooo!)
January 12th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
And, MandyDax, we could herd ice-rich asteroids into colliding with Mars, adding to its total water (lost over eons of solar wind stripping away its unprotected atmosphere). If we pound enough chunks into Mars, we could even heat its interior enough to stir some sort of magnetic field, perhaps protecting our neighbor from the worst of the solar wind. Too bad that means making much of the Martian globe molten and pushing back our colonization plans a few million years…
January 12th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
So now that they know WD5 is going to miss Mars, has anyone computed what the change to WD5′s orbit is going to be? It is obviously going to be close enough to Mars to be gravitationally affected.
January 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Steve P, I have a very small ‘scope, but if I focus on the Moon, say, and then wait fifteen seconds, it will have been rotated out of my field of view. The claim that fifteen second exposures can map the entire sky once every three nights is, I have to believe, an exaggeration based on the total area the telescope can map in theory v. the angular area of the sky. The telescope, and anyone with more knowledge of these things (that would be most of you) correct me, is claiming that by surveying x degrees of sky it is then resurveying the same x degrees three days later, having in the meantime surveyed the rest of the sky. This seems to me to be iffy.
January 13th, 2008 at 2:13 am
What almost happened at Mars shows how Earth is in Danger. We have to have our next president prepare us for threats such as these by developing spaceflight.
I have submitted a question for the Republican and Democratic debates that are happening in Los Angeles on January 30th. The way that this debate works is that people submit and vote for the questions that they like online, and the candidates are asked the ones with the most votes. Please tell everyone you think would act on this. I asked:
“NASA can and should send humans to Mars in the short term. Will you support a manned mission to Mars, or will you keep NASA’s hands tied by not giving them this mission that is worthy of the $16 billion they spend each year?”
People can find It by searching for “NASA” in the “Social Issues” section of both the Republic and Democratic voting sections at http://dyn.politico.com/debate/#%23
Even if you don’t agree with the premise of the question, the only way of to promote spaceflight effectively is getting this into the national discussion. Thank you!
January 13th, 2008 at 5:06 am
Forgive me if this makes me sound like an anti-space person, but I can think of a lot better things to do with $16 billion than sending a manned mission to Mars.
When the technology has advanced enough that interplanetary travel is cheap — and the serious problems solved, like the effect of solar storms on the health of interplanetary crews — interested parties can send their own manned missions to Mars.
January 13th, 2008 at 5:18 am
I would ask more revelant question – directly about stance of candidates on asteroid threat, giving as example hit of Shoemaker-Ley 9 or last near-miss of 2007 WD5. Would be nice to hear “more funds, more telescopes, refund of budget-failing ‘scopes”…
January 13th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Hmm, Barton, I think there’s a flaw with that logic – If we never push ourselves towards the goal of a manned mission to Mars, we’ll never have enough drive to develop interplanetary-distance-traversing technology. It’s like the race to the Moon – should we have waited until technology was good enough to reach the moon? I doubt it. I believe I read somewhere on this website that for every dollar invested in the Apollo program, twenty-six were made because of the development of new technologies associated with overcoming the huge obstacle of getting to the moon and back. If we made that much money (and technology) off of one little itty bitty hop to our Moon, just imagine what we could do if we went to Mars!
January 14th, 2008 at 6:06 am
John quoted:
“NASA can and should send humans to Mars in the short term. Will you support a manned mission to Mars, or will you keep NASA’s hands tied by not giving them this mission that is worthy of the $16 billion they spend each year?”
With all due respect, that’s a seriously stupid question.
The real question should be: “given that NASA spends $16 billion a year on science, Earth observation and maintaining the ISS White Elephant and the ageing space trucks, how much more are you prepared to vote to NASA to allow it to carry out its instructions to send men to Mars?”
January 14th, 2008 at 6:21 am
I agree that we as a species need to pull our fingers out and explore further than the end of the garden path, but we need to put our resources into fixing the central heating we’ve destroyed first…
January 14th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Dang, why do you HATE Mars so much guys? This kind of blog could just be the sort of thing to start a war with the neighbors….
January 27th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
A miss is as good as 500,000 miles.
Ha ha, you missed us!