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Asteroid Near-Misses (AKA: Holy Shit! We're All Going to Die)

Current thinking amongst geologists seems to be - one coffin, lots of nails.

I believe the impact explanation arose and remains the explanation in popular culture for a number of interesting reasons. First of all, we are in a period where very simple A B C explanations are the dominant norm. a) there was a big rock in space b) it hit the earth c) all dinosaurs plus mosasaurs, lots of species of shellfish, most of the Foraminifera etc died because of all the fire and dust and general terribleness*. On the other hand crocodiles, birds and mammals like it toasty warm, so they were OK.

Secondly there is the fall and rise of catastrophism in earth sciences. For over a hundred and fifty years geology was a science that rejected the notion of rapid large or planet wide changes. Enormous floods, immense upheavals, cities buried in brimstone were purely for the frankly overwrought and fictional Bible. Earthquakes and volcanic activity might be devastating, but these were localised events that could not level civilisations, never mind cause mass extinction. The 'standard model' was of an ancient planet v e r y slowly changing. To explain the landscape, text books described complex theories of basin spreading and the gentle rise or fall of the crust to form mountains and seas. Marie Stopes and Alfred Wegener’s ideas on continental drift were seen as, at best, on the fringe and at worse the musings of cranks. Even the work on ocean ridges undertaken by Columbia University in the late 50’s, which really began the modern study of plate tectonics was met with strong scepticism.

But by the early 70’s I believe two trends were converging. The threats of atomic war and large scale environmental destruction led to a sense of finitude and if not impending total annihilation then at least a dystopian near future. And in the fields of geology and astronomy the mass of evidence for the earth being a dynamic and changing system, often subject to extreme, violent and often brief events was becoming more accepted. The cosy ideas of the previous generation of geologists were replaced with super calderas, immense post glacial floods, tsunamis and a host of ever more extreme possibilities. And so currently we are always on the brink of featuring in our very own disaster movie, which gives a trip to Sainsburys a bit of an edge.

The discovery of impact debris all around the world at the KT boundary was a remarkable scientific achievement, and the correlation with the immense impact scar buried under Yucatan is I believe undisputed. Yet how this fits in with (to pick just a few things geologists have discussed since the early 80’s) volcanism in what would become India, a changing climate due to the widening Atlantic and the rapid changes in the evolution of the flowering plants is still being researched.



* You can put anything into that formula–ideas about social healthcare, social security systems, immigration, causes of criminal behaviour–lots of people really really do not like complexity. For example: a) The EU is dominated by Germany and France b) Lets be honest, historically the UK has had a hard time with those buggers c) Therefore the EU is just a bad thing. See Trump, Daily Mail et al
Sorry but you don't seem to have stabilized around a coherent topic, or maybe it’s me.
The URL’s from post 539 and 540 provide straightway data concerning a meaningful search for the demise of the Dinosaurs (and other flora and fauna) at the end of the Cretaceous period. The factors are numerous as the articles point out and since nobody was there they are doing their best with what they have.
I think with the new dating techniques and knowledge of weathering geology is at a pinnacle compared to years gone by.
 
True, I rattled that last post off too quickly - edging round my interest in the public engagement and perception of science without nailing it (as if that could be done in a few paragraphs). I'd hazard a guess that most people 'know' an asteroid impact led to a mass extinction. For geologists and palaeontologists discovering the cause or causes are obviously a work in progress. I also find it interesting that the notion we face an impending doom from some immense cataclysm ebbed away as the earth sciences became established, but it is now popular again, in part due to the work on mass extinctions and discoveries such as the Yucatan crater or the Yellowstone caldera to name just two.
 
Asteroid could be about to wipe out life on Earth, online pastor says in video that is almost certainly false
It’s true that a small asteroid will be flying past — and that Nasa had to revise its projections — but it’ll be very surprising if the rock really will bring about Earth’s ‘last hour’
Andrew Griffin

An asteroid is about to fly past Earth —and some people are convinced that it’s a sign of the end times. (It's not.)
The rock, known as 2013 TX68, is almost certainly going to pass by us without making any difference to life on Earth. But an internet pastor claims otherwise — arguing that it could be our “last hour”.
"The end times are here,” said Anita Fuentes in a video that was reported by The Sun. “It could be the last hour, the last second.
"We have to pay attention to all this that we're seeing."

But the claims have been completely rejected by Nasa, which has a centre specifically to track asteroids. The agency has confirmed that there will be no threat from the asteroid.
It did say that it had miscalculated the date and distance that the rock would fly by, last month. But the Earth is still very much safe.

"We already knew this asteroid, 2013 TX68, would safely fly past Earth in early March, but this additional data allow us to get a better handle on its orbital path," said Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s centre for tracking Near-Earth Objects. "The data indicate that this small asteroid will probably pass much farther away from Earth than previously thought."

The agency admitted that the rock might fly a little closer to Earth than expected. But it will get no closer than 15,000 miles — way further away than would be needed to cause any meaningful difference on Earth.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...or-says-in-video-that-is-almost-a6919346.html

Technical data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_TX68
 
An extremist, I would simple ignore him.
 
Doesn't Revelations mention stars falling to earth at the end times?
 
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Doesn't Revelations mention stars falling to earth at the end times?
You are correct, Revelations does predict stars falling to earth. Remember when the book was written they didn't know the difference between a star and any other type of heavenly body, I.E.: asteroids, etc. Anything that could light up the shy would be called a star.

However what happens is guys like this extremist take things out of context. Claiming this asteroid is curtains for us here on earth, when rynner2 clearly showed it wasn't dangerous.
 
So more of a timing problem then.
 
8 ‘potentially hazardous asteroids’ near Earth discovered by NASA

Eight new asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth were spotted by NASA’s asteroid-hunter among 439 other objects rotating around our planet, according to a report newly released by the space agency.
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope, which made a comeback in 2013 after going into hibernation mode in 2011, has come up with a second year’s worth of survey data on Earth’s surroundings that was published in a report by NASA.

And so on...

https://www.rt.com/news/338844-nasa-neowise-asteroids-danger/
 
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Nasa to launch probe to investigate 'Armageddon' asteroid
The asteroid will pass between Earth and the moon in 2135
Samuel Osborne

[Video shows how Osiris-Rex probe will work.]

Nasa is planning to launch a probe to collect rock samples from an asteroid it fears could one day hit the Earth.
The asteroid, named Bennu, can be seen from Earth as it crosses our orbit every six years.

Bennu, which is around 500 metres in diameter at its equator and travels around the sun at 63,000mph, will pass between Earth and the moon in 2135.
“That 2135 fly-by is going to tweak Bennu’s orbit, potentially putting it on course for the Earth later that century,” Dante Lauretta, professor of planetary science at Arizona University, told The Sunday Times.
“It may be destined to cause immense suffering and death,” he added.

Mr Lauretta, Nasa's principal investigator in charge of the Osiris-Rex probe mission to Bennu, launching in September, said the probe will map the asteroid, pick up some rock samples and then head back to Earth. He said information on the asteroid's size, mass and composition could be vital data for future generations.

Osiris-Rex will arrive at Bennu in 2018 and will spend a year surveying the asteroid's chemical makeup, mineralogy and geologic history. Information gathered during the observation will help scientists understand how its course is affected by absorbing and radiating sunlight as heat.

The probe will then take a sample from the asteroid before heading back to Earth for 2023.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-probe-asteroid-armageddon-bennu-space-a7164901.html

I don't think I shall lose much sleep over what may happen after 2135!

 
..Dante Lauretta, professor of planetary science at Arizona University, told The Sunday Times.
“It may be destined to cause immense suffering and death,” he added...

Nominative determinism ?

INT21
 
Don't worry, you will know if a big one hits.

And do you really want to know weeks in advance that you are to be wiped out by a high speed rock ?

INT21
 
Don't worry, you will know if a big one hits.

And do you really want to know weeks in advance that you are to be wiped out by a high speed rock ?

INT21
Yes. So I could totally get wasted and have a bloody good time before I die.
 
And after all the orgies, raping, killing and settling of old scores, there is an announcement...

'It's ok folks, it's gonna miss'.

Ooops.

INT21
 
Earth is overdue for collision with 'dinosaur-killer' asteroid, Nasa warns
Our planet is currently virtually defenceless against a strike by such a large object
Jon Sharman

Planet Earth is effectively defenceless in the face of a “dinosaur-killer” asteroid strike, a Nasa scientist has warned.
And the planet is overdue for an extinction-level event involving a giant space object – such as an asteroid or comet – following a number of close encounters over the last 20 years, Dr Joseph Nuth said.

Large objects from outer space that could cause mass extinctions have tended to hit Earth about 50 to 60 million years apart. The dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago by an asteroid that struck what is now the Gulf of Mexico.

Dr Nuth, speaking at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in San Francisco, said that if a potentially dangerous object was on a crash-course with our planet “there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment”, according to The Guardian.
He said: “They are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due.”

Earth had a “close encounter” with a comet in 1996 and again in 2014, when one passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”, he said.
Scientists had only 22 months’ warning time for the second pass, less than half the time currently needed to get a craft capable of deflecting such an object into space, Dr Nuth said.

Dr Nuth said he had recommended Nasa build an interceptor craft and keep it in storage in order to cut down on the time it takes to organise such a mission.

Dr Cathy Plesko, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Guardian that humans could deflect an Earth-bound asteroid or comet with either a nuclear warhead or a “kinetic impactor, which is basically a giant cannonball”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...asteroid-comet-extinction-event-a7481161.html
 
Here's a world map illustrating known small asteroid strikes based on a 2014 NASA compilation covering two decades' worth of data.

'Asteroid Strikes': The data this map is based on was released in November 2014 by Nasa's Near-Earth Object Observation Program. It shows the global distribution of of small asteroid strikes, ranging in size from 3.5ft to 65.5ft, between 1994 and 2013. The yellow dots are daytime strikes, the blue dots are night strikes. These vary in size by level of impact (measured in joules).

AsteroidStrikes-WorldMap.jpg


SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/t...aps-reveal-global-activity-minute-detail.html
 
Here's a big - astronomical - example of pareidolia - an asteroid on whose close pass in 2015 was seen by some as resembling a skull. This asteroid will swoop by earth again in late 2018.

Haunted Again: Skull-Faced 'Halloween Asteroid' Returns in 2018
Astronomers will soon get another look at the big, ghoulishly weird space rock that buzzed Earth on Halloween three years ago. ...

The roughly 2,100-foot-wide (640 meters) Halloween asteroid 2015 TB145 gave Earth a close shave on Oct. 31, 2015, coming within just 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of our planet. (For perspective, the moon orbits at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, or 384,600 km.)

A Halloween flyby was quite appropriate, it turned out: Observations made at the time by a variety of instruments revealed that 2015 TB145 looks like an enormous skull, at least from some angles. ...

FULL STORY (with observational imagery and artist's conception):

https://www.livescience.com/61257-skull-asteroid-returns-2018.html
 
Doomed I tell ya


There’s a different kind of Halloween sequel in the works, and it’s coming soon to the skies near Earth.

A skull-like asteroid that passed Earth in October 2015 is coming back for another visit in early November. Officially named 2015 TB145, the asteroid has been called The Great Pumpkin by NASA because of its Halloween flyby three years ago.

2015 TB145 has also been described as a “death comet” because it’s believed to be a dead comet and because of its skull shape, which was picked up on radar images from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico: ...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...cid=newsltushpmgnews__TheMorningEmail__110118
 
Something else to worry about.... At https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/26/8931776/near-earth-asteroid-tracking

A “city-killing” asteroid just zipped by Earth. Why didn’t we see it coming?
NASA tracks big asteroids. Small ones — which can still do damage — are harder to spot.
By Kelsey Piper Jul 26, 2019, 2:40pm EDT

On Thursday, an asteroid called 2019 OK, traveling at almost 15 miles a second, came unusually close to impacting Earth. The asteroid passed by about 43,500 miles away — closer to Earth than our moon is. It was one of the closest known approaches of an asteroid to Earth since we started closely tracking the movements of objects in space.

If you had binoculars and knew exactly where to look, you could have briefly seen 2019 OK in the sky.
NASA tracks large asteroids in order to identify any that might be on a threatening trajectory toward Earth. But 2019 OK was first seen a few days ago, and was only definitively identified as an asteroid yesterday — hours before it passed right by us.
How’d they miss it? Well, while 2019 OK could have done a lot of damage if we’d gotten very unlucky — as Swinburne University astronomer Alan Duffy told the Sydney Morning-Herald, the asteroid would have struck Earth with “over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima” — it’s not actually all that big.

The asteroid is estimated to be “between 187 feet and 427 feet in diameter.” The largest passenger aircraft in service today (the Airbus A380-800) is about 240 feet long, so spotting this asteroid would have been a bit like spotting a single big commercial jet in the vast expanse of space — traveling at 15 miles a second and coming toward us directly from the sun, which makes spotting it more difficult.

Even a small asteroid like 2019 OK could potentially do a lot of damage if it’d hit Earth, rather than missing by 43,500 miles, but for it to be, as lots of outlets called it, a “city killer”asteroid, we would have needed several more unlikely things to go wrong. A 45,000-mile near-miss is very close compared to how vast space is, but it’s still a fair bit — Earth itself is about 8,000 miles across. About 0.5 percent of asteroids that come this close or closer will actually hit us...........

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/26/8931776/near-earth-asteroid-tracking
 
Timble2,

If you go look on the Spaceweather.com site you will find a section that has updated info on known approaches.

The distances are expressed in 'LD' (Lunar Distance).

So if we call it 250,000 miles, a miss of 0.5 LD means that it will (should) miss by 125,000 miles.

Here is an example..
Name 2019 OK
date 2019-Jul-25
distance to miss by 0.2 LD (50,000 Miles).


24.5
79​

Don't worry about this one, it's gone.

Click on the blue link for more information than you may wish to know.

Such as there are 1,983 potentially hazardous objects out there at the moment.
 
Last edited:
Timble2,

If you go look on the Spaceweather.com site you will find a section that has updated info on known approaches.

The distances are expressed in 'LD' (Lunar Distance).

So if we call it 250,000 miles, a miss of 0.5 LD means that it will (should) miss by 125,000 miles.

Here is an example..
Name 2019 OK
date 2019-Jul-25
distance to miss by 0.2 LD (50,000 Miles).


24.5
79​

Don't worry about this one, it's gone.

Click on the blue link for more information than you may wish to know.

Such as there are 1,983 potentially hazardous objects out there at the moment.

re: 'Notable & Unusual Meteorites (Meteors That Landed / Impacted).' I submitted my report on the one I witnessed to 'Martin Reece.' Still have the letter somewhere in my folder. He had his Secretary reply saying "very interesting!"
That Asteroid was indeed very large, and pear shaped, like a huge and highly colourful glowing piece of red hot coke.
 
2019 OK was/is bigger than Tunguska! Scary stuff.
 
We're all doomed again, there's still time to deflect it so that it hits Cromer though.

The American space agency is keeping a close eye on a massive asteroid that could eventually smash into Earth.

The asteroid, known as JF1 is designated a ‘near-Earth object’ (NEO) meaning it orbits the sun and comes close enough to our planet to cause concern.

‘Some asteroids and comets follow orbital paths that take them much closer to the Sun and therefore Earth – than usual,’ Nasa explained. ‘If a comet’s or asteroid’s approach brings it to within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun, we call it a Near-Earth object.’ Experts believe that JF1 measures around 130 meters in diameter – and believe it’s about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

The asteroid JF1 was first discovered back in 2009 and Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been watching it for the last decade. The space agency has tasked its automated asteroid watching system – known as Sentry – with keeping an eye on it. ‘Sentry is a highly automated collision monitoring system that continually scans the most current asteroid catalogue for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years,’ Nasa said. They believe, were it to strike Earth, it would be the equivalent to detonating 230 kilotonnes of TNT. That kind of a detonation would dwarf the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945, which exploded with the force of 15 kilotonnes of TNT.


Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/14/nasa...article.desktop.share.top.twitter?ito=cbshare
 
Spaceweather.com is you friend on these subjects.
 
We're all doomed again...

The asteroid, known as JF1 is designated a ‘near-Earth object’ (NEO) meaning it orbits the sun and comes close enough to our planet to cause concern.

‘Some asteroids and comets follow orbital paths that take them much closer to the Sun and therefore Earth – than usual,’ Nasa explained. ‘If a comet’s or asteroid’s approach brings it to within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun, we call it a Near-Earth object.’

Just for context, "1.3 astronomical units" is almost 121,000,000 miles.

Besides, warble gloaming will get us first. Or Ebola. Or plastic in orangutans.

maximus otter
 
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