I'll be 49, stinking rich....I'll probably watch it from my compound (Because rich people dont just have houses!) while having sex with supermodels. Thats if my life plans all fall into place.
Let's load that rock up with some cool gadgets as it passes by, Free ride to the other side of the solar system.
Exactly. Nasa, ESA, Russia all need to get together and put some cameras/telescopes etc. on that rock so we can see the solar system from a new perspective.
To ensure the safety of my Clutchfan brethren I will continue to update this thread until our date with destiny -- or until i'm banned for one too many sarcastic remarks. ______ German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures: paper A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated. Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported. NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right. The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029. Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth -- and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres. If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036. Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean. The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely. The 13-year old made his discovery as part of a regional science competition for which he submitted a project entitled: "Apophis -- The Killer Astroid." link
I predict you are banned before 2029. Just a guess. good lord. whoops. Maybe the team that bombarded Mars by making an English->metric error was put on the asteroid calculation team! LOL. It will have to be cited just like that in the scientific literature now. Cheetah, do you or anyone else understand why hitting a small satellite means it would definitely hit us next time around?
That is some sort of error -- there is no way a 50-200 billion ton rock moving many miles per second will be influenced by a tiny satellite. The whole bit on the asteroid striking the Atlantic is strange as well -- unless they have calculated exactly which way the earth will be facing during the pass. I guess that isn't that difficult to figure out actually. There are some German to English translation errors in that article I believe.
LOL, maybe they are just quoting the 13-yr-old's report with abandon now! "And, and, then the tsunamis go like everywhere, and then robots that were sleeping on the bottom of the ocean fly up and shoot rays and..." Okay, that is more like a 7-yr-old, or me when I was 15, but I digress.
This pretty cool -- a mission to tag and track the asteroid looks like it should be ready to go... ______ Projects: Apophis Mission Design Competition How do you tag and track an asteroid that might be on a collision course with Earth? The first place winners of The Planetary Society's $50,000 Apophis Mission Design Competition presented their innovative solutions at a press conference today in Pasadena, California. First place went to the team led by SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc. of Atlanta, Georgia in conjunction with SpaceDev, Inc., Poway, California for their mission, entitled Foresight. Mark G. Schaffer served as Principal Investigator. To keep mission costs low, the winning design, Foresight, proposes a simple orbiter with only two instruments and a radio beacon at a cost of $137.2 million. The spacecraft would launch aboard a Minotaur IV, leaving Earth sometime between 2012 and 2014, to arrive at Apophis five to ten months later. It would then rendezvous with, observe, and track the asteroid. Foresight would orbit the asteroid to gather data with a multi-spectral imager for one month. It would then leave orbit and fly in formation with Apophis around the Sun at a range of two kilometers (1.2 miles). The spacecraft would use laser ranging to the asteroid and radio tracking from Earth for ten months to accurately determine the asteroid's orbit and how it might change. Pharos, the winning student entry, would be an orbiter with four science instruments (a multi-spectral imager, near-infrared spectrometer, laser rangefinder, and magnetometer) that would rendezvous with and track Apophis. Earth-based tracking of the spacecraft would then allow precise tracking of the asteroid. The Pharos spacecraft would also carry four instrumented probes that it would launch individually over the course of two weeks. Accelerometers and temperature sensors on the probes would measure the seismic effects of successive probe impacts, a creative way to explore the interior structure and dynamics of the asteroid. full article
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/16/esa_german_schoolboy_apophis_denial/ Schoolboy's asteroid-strike sums are wrong German kid saw 1 in 450 chance of Apophis apocalypse Widespread media reports claim that a German schoolboy has recalculated the likelihood of a deadly planet-smasher asteroid hitting the Earth, and found the catastrophe is enormously more likely than NASA thought. The boy's sums were said to have been checked by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and found to be correct. There's only one problem with the story: the kid's sums are in fact wrong, NASA's are right, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. An ESA spokesman in Germany told the Reg this morning: "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct." It would appear that the intial article in the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, which says that NASA and the ESA endorsed Nico Marquardt's calculations, was incorrect. The story was picked up by German tabloids and the AFP news wire, and is now all over the internet. Marquardt apparently reckoned that the odds of the well-known Apophis asteroid hitting Earth were not one in 45,000 as assessed by NASA, but rather one in 450. Apophis will pass close by Earth in 2029 and 2036, so close that it will come nearer than satellites in geostationary orbit. It seems that Marquardt's calculations included the possibility of collision with a satellite in some way not thought to have been covered by NASA, which bumped up the odds of a subsequent Earth strike. But NASA says: [The asteroid will pass] within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region.
"Doomsday asteroid" Apophis flies by Earth tonight European space telescope has captured new images of the huge asteroid Apophis, revealing that the potentially hazardous object is actually bigger than previously thought -- and you have a chance to see the space rock yourself in two free webcasts Wednesday night. Asteroid Apophis has long been billed as a "doomsday asteroid" because of a 2004 study that predicted a 2.7 percent chance of the space rock hitting Earth when it passes within 22,364 miles of the planet in April 2029, European Space Agency officials said. Later studies proved, however, that the asteroid poses no threat to Earth during that flyby, but astronomers continue to track the object since it will make another pass near Earth in 2036. Today, ESA officials announced that its infrared Herschel Space Observatory has discovered that Apophis is about 1,066 feet wide, nearly 20 percent larger than a previous estimate of 885 feet. "The 20 percent increase in diameter ... translates into a 75 percent increase in our estimates of the asteroid's volume or mass," study leader Thomas M?ller of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, said in a statement. Tonight's two free webcasts will stream live views of Apophis from telescopes in Italy and the Canary Islands tonight (Jan. 10). The webcasts, offered by the stargazing websites Slooh Space Telescope and Virtual Telescope Project, will show Apophis as a bright light moving across the night sky. The asteroid is too small to be seen through small backyard telescopes. The Slooh Space Camera webcast will begin at 7 p.m. EST. The Virtual Telescope webcast will begin an hour later at 8 p.m. EST. You can watch both live webcasts of asteroid Apophis on SPACE.com tonight. Apophis will be just under 9.3 million miles from Earth at the time of tonight's webcasts, amateur astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project told SPACE.com. "Alone among all these near-Earth asteroids that have passed our way in recent years, Apophis has generated the most concern worldwide because of its extremely close approach in 2029 and [chances of a] potential impact, albeit small, in 2036," Slooh president Patrick Paolucci said in a statement. In addition to asteroid Apophis, astronomers regularly scan the night sky for asteroids that may pose a potential impact threat to Earth. NASA's Near-Earth Object Office and Asteroid Watch program is based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. link
You're DOOMED B-bob -- you've made no preparations after 7 years of warnings do not ask me for granola and/ or energy bars.
or pick from one of these: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/512481-nba-201011-sam-cassell-all-stars-the-all-alien-team
