A
Anonymous
Guest
I paid my bills that day. Had I known disaster was imminent I may not have gone to the trouble.
If, I were a very cynical person, I would say, `What a way to boost the R/D budget for the next seventeen years.'A preliminary orbit suggests that 2002 NT7 is on an impact course with Earth and could strike the planet on 1 February, 2019 - although the uncertainties are large.
chatsubo said:Holy Shit! We are all going to die!
...........if the asteroid thats currently 17 years away is on a collision course (possibly, we don't actually know that yet)Holy Shit! We are all going to die!
River_Styx said:Hang on. Doesn't that description sound familiar??
No, smaller pieces would more likely burn up in the atmosphere, and those that did get through would have much lower impact velocity.JackSkellington said:A giant space laser will only break the asteroid into small pieces that will act like carpet bombing instead of a single impact.
I'm puzzled by this - the Earth orbits at nearly 30 km/s, and an asteroid with apogee out near Mars would not be going 28 km/h faster when it reaches earth orbit. I'll do some calculations and report back! (I'm assuming the orbit is not retrograde - then the impact velocity would be well over 60 km/s!)Researchers estimate that on 1 February, 2019, its impact velocity on the Earth would be 28 km a second - enough to wipe out a continent and cause global climate changes.
However, the small amount of data leaves large margins of error. The asteroid's position within its orbit at that time is uncertain by several tens of millions of kilometres, says Donald Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All calculations so far show the chance of an impact in 2019 is less than one in 100,000.