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May 22, 2006
We're All Doomed (Sorta)
I blame Jerry Bruckheimer. Now all of these space objects want to be famous.
In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.Wow. If I knew what that whole 'meter' thing was about, I'd get nervous. (H/t: Lileks)A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.
Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.
UPDATE: Hi, this is Joe, I hope Peter doesn't mind me editing one of his posts from February. Using the 1000' wide Arecibo radar telescope, astronomers have discovered that they had misjudged Apophis' speed by one quarter-inch per second, reducing the chance of impact from 1/5000 to 1/24000. Here is the crux of the problem. The asteroid is going to pass about 23000 miles from Earth in 2029. This is close enough that Earth's gravity is going to change Apophis' orbit around the Sun. There is a sweet spot about 2000' wide (the asteroid itself is about 1000' wide) that is the correct distance from Earth so that the asteroid will hit Earth in 2036. If it comes closer than the "keyhole," it will be perturbed too much and miss us on one side, if it passes farther from Earth than the keyhole, it will be perturbed too little and miss us on the other side. The tiny speed adjustment, when propagated forward 23 years, is enough to dramatically reduce the chance of an impact.
Posted by slublog at May 22, 2006 08:50 AM
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Comments
Hang on - I thought Apophis was the name of a parisitic alien snake thingy that burrows into people's heads and possesses them. Now it's the name of a "390-metre wide asteroid"? We live in strange times.
Posted by: Enas Yorl at February 15, 2006 03:31 PM
Whew.
Posted by: Slublog at May 22, 2006 08:49 PM