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Asteroid Passing By Monday!

A 1954 Sci-Fi flick 'Riders To The Stars', depicted scientists in rocket ships attempting to catch meteors to study. It would have been cool to land a probe on this asteroid, like putting a radio collar on an animal, to see what it's made of and where it goes.

Maybe next time. ;)
 


Trajectory of 2011 MD projected onto the Earth's orbital plane. Note from this viewing angle, the asteroid passes underneath the Earth:


Trajectory of 2011 MD from the general direction of the Sun:


Near-Earth asteroid 2011 MD will pass only 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) above the Earth's surface on Monday June 27 at about 9:30 EDT. The asteroid was discovered by the LINEAR near-Earth object discovery team observing from Socorro, New Mexico. The diagram on the left shows the trajectory of 2011 MD projected onto the Earth's orbital plane over a four-day interval. The diagram on the left gives another view from the general direction of the Sun that indicates that 2011 MD will reach its closest Earth approach point in extreme southern latitudes (in fact over the southern Atlantic Ocean). This small asteroid, only 5-20 meters in diameter, is in a very Earth-like orbit about the Sun, but an orbital analysis indicates there is no chance it will actually strike Earth on Monday. The incoming trajectory leg passes several thousand kilometers outside the geosynchronous ring of satellites and the outgoing leg passes well inside the ring. One would expect an object of this size to come this close to Earth about every 6 years on average. For a brief time, it will be bright enough to be seen even with a modest-sized telescope.

Don Yeomans & Paul Chodas
NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office
June 23, 2011
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news172.html
Click to expand...

Newly-discovered asteroid 2011 MD will pass only 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) above Earth’s surface on Monday June 27 at about 9:30 a.m. EDT. NASA analysts say there is no chance the space rock will strike Earth. Nevertheless, the encounter is so close that Earth’s gravity will sharply alter the asteroid’s trajectory.


At closest approach, 2011 MD will pass in broad daylight over the southern Atlantic Ocean near the coast of Antarctica. As the asteroid recedes from Earth, it will pass through the zone of geosynchronous satellites. The chances of a collision with a satellite or manmade space junk are extremely small, albeit not zero.

Judging from the brightness of the asteroid, it measures only 5 to 20 meters in diameter. According to JPL’s Near Earth Object Program office, one would expect an object of this size to come this close to Earth about every 6 years on average. For a brief time, it will be bright enough to be seen even with a medium-sized backyard telescope.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/24/something-more-worrisome-than-global-warming/
Click to expand...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/24/something-more-worrisome-than-global-warming/#comment-688065
 
Trysail -- All of us understand hypertext links. We know how to click on them. We aren't going to miss one single, precious, graph.

Honest.

:D:D:D
 
One thing about that story that raised my eyebrows. It said that stony asteroids of the size that will miss us usually break up in the atmosphere and don't bother anyone. But what about the nickel iron ones? Ten feet across? The size of a Volkswagen Beetle? Isn't that the size the dug Meteor Crater Arizona?
 
voluptuary_manque said:
One thing about that story that raised my eyebrows. It said that stony asteroids of the size that will miss us usually break up in the atmosphere and don't bother anyone. But what about the nickel iron ones? Ten feet across? The size of a Volkswagen Beetle? Isn't that the size the dug Meteor Crater Arizona?
Click to expand...

I think you're referring to the Barringer Crater in Arizona. That occurred 50 million years ago. A more recent event was the Tunguska event that ocurred in Siberia in 1908. Technically that was an air burst (like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs) that cleared an area over 800 sq. mi. Who knows what it would have done had it hit the ground. :eek:
 
voluptuary_manque said:
One thing about that story that raised my eyebrows. It said that stony asteroids of the size that will miss us usually break up in the atmosphere and don't bother anyone. But what about the nickel iron ones? Ten feet across? The size of a Volkswagen Beetle? Isn't that the size the dug Meteor Crater Arizona?
Click to expand...

Meteor Crater in Arizona was formed about 50,000 years ago, which is why it is still so visible on the earth's surface. Had it been formed 50 million years ago, most traces of it would have long ago been weathered away.

The asteroid was about 50 meters in diameter or about 165 feet. It likely weighed in the neighborhood of 275 million kilograms (300,000 tons). Impacting at about 12 kilometers per second, it hit with a force of about 2 1/2 megatons of TNT (about 150 Hiroshima bombs).

The crater is also properly referred to as Barringer Meteorite Crater, after Daniel Moreau Barringer, a Philadelphia mining engineer who was convinced that the crater was caused by an impact event, as opposed to a steam explosion as visioned by Grove Karl Gilbert, the chief geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Barringer hoped that a sizable amount of iron and possibly nickel was waiting just under the crater floor, ready to be mined. He and a small group of investors formed the Standard Iron Company.

Things didn't go well for the entrepreneurs. Barringer had estimated the mass of the meteoroid at over ten million tons. They found traces of iron but no mother-lode. They did hit water in amounts too great to pump out of the shaft. It was then that they decided to call on an astronomer for an opinion.

Forest Ray Moulton, from the University of Chicago determined that the impactor was only about 3% of the size claimed by Barringer and was likely almost completely vaporized on impact.

So what?

F. R. Moulton was one of only a few astronomers who believed that the crater was caused by an impact. At the time and for decades afterwards, the prevailing scientific opinion was that impact craters on Earth were non-existent. There were also very few geologists and astronomers who believed that the myriad of craters visible on the Moon were of impact origin. It was felt that they were all volcanic. Even as Apollo 11 was en route to the Moon, major players in the lunar and planetary astronomy field still had nothing but contempt for an impact origin theory for lunar craters.

It wasn't until 1960 that geologist Eugene Shoemaker and colleagues proved that the crater in Arizona was caused by an impact. (Shoemaker, along with his wife Carolyn and Canadian amateur astronomer David Levy discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, the one that spectacularly broke up and plunged into Jupiter back in July, 1994.) Eugene died in a car accident while in Australia, searching for previously unknown impact craters. On July 31, 1999, some of his ashes were carried to the Moon by the Lunar Prospector space probe. To date, he is the only person to have been buried on the Moon.

As for NASA being able to accurately predict that this recent "Near Earth Asteroid" was going to pass by at 12,000 kilometers distance, you can thank F. R. Moulton for that. His 1902 book, An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics is still considered the Bible of orbital calculation. I have a copy of the Dover reprint of his second edition (1914). What Moulton didn't know about celestial mechanics isn't worth knowing. Using gee-whiz computers, NASA can calculate an orbit quicker, but they can't do it any better than Moulton could do it, over a century ago.
 
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3113 said:
I did my best Claudette Colbert imitation as it went past...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CpjG9enu18k/TRJwPSwZOZI/AAAAAAAAAVA/4CkuvGZmPYE/s1600/Claudette_Colbert_in_It_Happened_One_Night.jpg

....but it just kept going :( Looks like I'm stuck here till the next one goes by....
Click to expand...

Obviously, you used the wrong Claudette Colbert imitation.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_94wGm5Prdv0/SxC-2TOcm1I/AAAAAAAAFZA/Q5_jXET6oY0/s1600/3026-Annex+-+Colbert,+Claudette+(Sign+of+the+Cross,+The)_03.jpg

This is the one you should have used!!

BTW, that's not a sponge loofah Claudette is offering up. It's Mini-Meteorite...
 
3113 said:
I did my best Claudette Colbert imitation as it went past...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CpjG9enu18k/TRJwPSwZOZI/AAAAAAAAAVA/4CkuvGZmPYE/s1600/Claudette_Colbert_in_It_Happened_One_Night.jpg

....but it just kept going :( Looks like I'm stuck here till the next one goes by....
Click to expand...

Don't feel like you've been snubbed, 3113. It was only a "near-Earth" asteroid. You'll have to wait for one to come in from the Kuiper Belt for it to be old enough to even know who Claudette Colbert is.
 
mynameisben said:
Don't feel like you've been snubbed, 3113. It was only a "near-Earth" asteroid. You'll have to wait for one to come in from the Kuiper Belt for it to be old enough to even know who Claudette Colbert is.
Click to expand...

I'm only 35, and I have seen "It Happened One Night", the movie that screen capture is from. ;)
 
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