In 1967, Project Icarus was developed at MIT as a graduate study to consider the possibility of dealing with a piece of space rock on a collision course with Earth. This project was the inspiration for the 1979 movie Meteor . The eponymous asteroid, 1566 Icarus, was known to be an Earth-crosser, with a solar periapse inside the orbit of Mercury (hence the name) and apoapse outside the orbit of Mars. This eccentricity makes it potentially vulnerable to perturbation — influence on its orbit by other bodies.
That aside, Icarus does already make close approaches to Earth; since its discovery in 1949, every 9, 19 or 28 years close approaches have varied between 15.1Gm (1996) and 6.4Gm (1968). This June 15, it will pass at 8Gm, or 21 times the distance to the Moon. Close approach distances for Icarus are pretty chaotic given that the asteroid is regularly perturbed by Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars (and to a lesser extent, Jupiter and Saturn as well) during its orbit.
A bit closer to "now", 2015 FW117 (a hunk of iron ~180m on its long axis) will pass 1.38Gm (3.6 Lunar distances) from Earth on 1 April. Just yesterday (28 March), 2015 FM118, a chip the size of a minibus, shaved the Pale Blue Dot at a range inside the Lunar orbit, 350Mm.
For the edification of those who read the tables linked and think we're all going to die in a horrible fireball, consider this: the Apollo that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013, injuring thousands with flying glass, was previously unknown and there was no prior warning of its approach. They say you don't hear the bullet that hits you. The same is (currently) true of asteroids.
The question is, given that we're already expending massive amounts of public and private money in detecting and tracking these things with everything from Mk.I Eyeball and binoculars to radio telescopes, along with Hubble in the few minutes it gets to cool its fins every now and then, what more can be done to a: find and track Near Earth Objects, and b: if necessary, do something about the ones that do pose a threat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @07:22PM
Hurray! We're not dying a fiery death due to an asteroid we know about ... yet.
Good news, everyone! Zoidberg is right for a change!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @12:05AM
Good news, everyone! I've invented a device that makes you read this to yourself in the voice of Professor Fansworth!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday March 29 2015, @07:26PM
Meteor! Undoubtedly Connery's finest hour, at least until he made Last Crusade...
Many a Starlog magazine [archive.org] devoted pages of ink to this masterpiece!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @10:14PM
Zardoz was fun too....
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday March 29 2015, @10:32PM
Zardoz is the center of a religious experience. Best watch on a double-bill with Excalibur. Boorman!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @10:36PM
Just re-imagine Outland [imdb.com] as pr0n with multiple scenes of Sean and Frances Sternhagen, and Peter Boyle and Frances Sternhagen. Perhaps an MMF threesome too.
No. You won't be able to un-imagine *that*.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday March 30 2015, @03:31PM
Outland. Another I'd forgotten. :-)
Again, best viewed on a double-bill with Saturn 3.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Sunday March 29 2015, @07:32PM
I'm all for additional spending to better understand space and our local neighborhood. We need to know this stuff.
That said, there has been progress. Check out this video [youtube.com] for a visualization showing how far we've come in just 30 years (it's a crowded neighborhood). We're still finding more, but hysteria and public panic isn't the right method to try and drum up funding. Even if it works, the money dries up fast after the next celebrity scandal when the press (a term I use ironically to refer to our mainstream
propaganda machinemedia) moves on.(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday March 29 2015, @10:20PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @09:49PM
Bieber must be stopped.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Justin Case on Sunday March 29 2015, @10:32PM
Eventually we have to get some of our sorry asses off this rock. Distributed processing, redundancy, failover locations, offsite backup... however you want to look at it.
As a species used to living on a big rock, the natural assumption is we have to find another big rock. Instead, consider using asteroids as raw materials to fabricate permanent space cities -- big enough for a durable ecosystem and comfortable enough to spend a lifetime. Only when we have a few of those up and running will the species as a whole have a decent chance of surviving a doomsday event: meteor impact, global warming, war... whatever. We've had all our eggs in one planet for too long.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday April 12 2015, @09:06PM
We came here, we will someday go away. Individually and collectively, there is some terminal point where we stop existing.
So much of human energy and activity is channeled into preventing this inevitability or irrationally distracting ourselves with a material accumulation that cannot prevent this.
That same effort, used to make the most of the present time, for each other, would result in a paradise before our eyes.
But that, too, is a distracting fantasy I suppose. Men are not angels, and most are not even men...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1) by axsdenied on Monday March 30 2015, @04:27AM
The choice of units Gm and Mm is rather weird. I am guessing that it comes from the Wikipedia page for 1566 Icarus?
I almost finished reading through the whole summary before realising that these are giga and mega meters. I don't think I have seen these used before and I am a physicist.
Lunar distances are much more meaningful in this context.
(Score: 2) by khchung on Monday March 30 2015, @06:37AM
That's a common problem when you see journalist* reporting scientific stuff.
Instead of choosing a useful measure, like Lunar distance or geosync orbit or Earth diameter, as a reference, journalists like to bandy BIG NUMBERS to make the story sound more impressive that it was.
And, they don't know enough to stick to the same unit. If 1.38Gm was already used, they should have stuck with 0.35Gm instead of 350Mm. You would have imagined the writer was trying to confuse, rather than to inform, the readers.
* - I don't really know if the original article was written by a journalist or not, but if not, it was certainly just as bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @09:51AM
at least he wasn't mixing units...
(Score: 1) by axsdenied on Monday March 30 2015, @11:48AM
Hmm, "...will pass 1.38Gm (3.6 Lunar distances)..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @04:06PM
meaning giving it in Gm in one example then LD in the next, miles in the next, femtometres in the next... giving two scales to represent the same distance in the same example isn't exactly "mixing". It's giving the reader the choice as to which scale he's going to follow - a few don't understand Gm and its relationship to km, most people know what a Lunar distance is and a fair few know how it relates to near cosmological scale.
(Score: 1) by jrial on Monday March 30 2015, @07:59AM
On the other hand, I always wondered why we use the appropriate prefix (nano, pico, kilo, giga, ...) for almost everything, except when it comes to distances...
1000 bytes? => 1 kilobyte
1000 kilobytes? => 1 megabyte
But on the other hand:
1000 meters? => 1 kilometer
1000 kilometers? => 1000 kilometers.
Why? What's wrong with megameter? It's almost as if distance is exempt from this rule because it's something a layman uses too on a daily basis, and we don't want to confuse laymen with scientific notation.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 30 2015, @08:24AM
shaved the Pale Blue Dot
Is that like "gleaming the cube"? Or is it some new sex craze among the young people?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TLA on Monday March 30 2015, @10:01AM
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980; Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space, 1997
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander