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Whats The Deal With Earth And Asteroids Lately

I've noticed those reports, too. I'm thinking more than one thing about them; one being that they're over emphasizing, and the other:

Our planet is over 4 billion years old, and humans with detection devices with the capability of calculating impact possibilities have only been around a tiny fraction of that time.

Meanwhile, we've been slugged by thousands of meteors, an asteroid or two, and millions of smaller meteors (every day).

It's an interesting thing. Check out photos of planets with no oceans or thick atmospheres, or our moon itself.. craters everywhere, from one end of the planet or moon to the other.

Our thick atmosphere burns up 99% of the rocks which our gravity attracts in conjunction with the object's trajectory. Lucky us. ;)
 
Looks like scientists going crazy over something again...before long we will hear the end is near again haha.

But really I mean asteroids, like Frisco said, have been hitting the Earth since probably the beginning of time.

I feel that we really don't have much to worry about. :)
 
Digital Controller said:
Looks like scientists going crazy over something again...before long we will hear the end is near again haha.

But really I mean asteroids, like Frisco said, have been hitting the Earth since probably the beginning of time.

I feel that we really don't have much to worry about. :)
Click to expand...

Please, no more end of the world.
 
Actually I've not noticed any increase in frequency. Things pass close to Earth fairly often, every few years at any rate. Simple statistics means that sometimes these will happen a little closer together than others. It's nothing unusual. You might not have picked up on the last few, or maybe the media outlets you read didn't (the hype generally comes from the media rather than the scientists - nobody got worried about this one really, and there was more interest in measuring its trajectory well enough to know whether it would get us in future than in what it would do on this pass).

The last really big hit was Tunguska in 1908. Yeah, that would have been like a nuke going off, except no radiation. But hey, as long as the next one of those doesn't hit Yellowstone you'll probably be fine ;).

Even so, put it into perspective: we're not talking anything close to a dinosaur killer here; those are more like one in a hundred million years. So while you can argue there might be reasons for establishing bases off the Earth (though you can also argue that sorting out some of our problems here is more important), avoiding one of those events isn't (in my opinion) a good argument.
 
Some of the NEOs are small. They have odd orbits. Years ago, a 3 inch refractor and a 6 inch reflector was IT for the backyard astronomers. The Palomar was the largest scope on earth.

Now we have adaptive optics, scopes like the twin Kecks, scopes in orbit, and backyard astronomers have very good CCD cameras, driven mounts, 18 - 36 inch truss telescopes, so more is seen. These smaller asteroids can be found by photos.
Some scopes are set to scan the skies robotically. Their photos will pick up a lot.
 
My feeling on all of this is that the world WILL END when it is supposed to, and not one day sooner!:) I don't worry about asteroids, or any of that. Worry won't change a thing. I am more concerned about the crazies out there, and how to (hopefully) stay out of their line of fire, both literally, and figuratively!:p
 
Part of the reason you're seeing more reports is because we're actually looking for asteroids much more than we were - it's actually been recognised as a risk we need to think about.

The risk of a catastrophic hit is actually statistically very high - it is in fact, inevitable - fortunately, the time scales are pretty high, too. It could be millions of years before anything comes our way. On the other hand, could be tomorrow.

People like NASA are thinking about what to do when we spot an asteroid coming - we expect to have years to work something out because we're likely to spot any asteroid that big well before it hits.

Unfortunately, doing something is not as easy as it sounds. The movie favourite of nuke-ing it has basically been rejected as totally bogus. I think the best ideas at the minute revolve around 'nudging' the asteriods course so it misses us. Not sure they've worked out how to do the nudging yet, though.
 
Xyro said:
Funnily enough, one common hypothesis is that the moon only exists as a product of Earth and a Mars sized planet colliding together.

Giant impact hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Click to expand...

I usually agree with another theory about the moon (I'm careful to not make up my mind about this stuff ;)). It's known by its current trajectory around Earth that it used to be much much closer, and larger in the sky (long before humans were here, of course), and that it continues to move away from our planet, very slowly in small increments of course.

I sometimes think it was a "near miss" capture by Earth's gravity, just like most moons around the planets in this solar system. At the moment, we're practically a binary planet system; Earth and Moon, rather than a planet with a satellite. Once it is gone from Earth-orbit, maybe it'll find its place as another planet revolving around the sun, quite some time from now. Probably over several weeks (checking Mayan calendar :D).
 
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