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posted by FatPhil on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-behind-you dept.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Panic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us.

The supposedly planet-threatening 100-foot-(30-metre)-diameter space rock, dubbed 2006 QV89, was discovered in August 2006. Following observations over ten days, astronomers predicted it had a 1-in-7,000 chance of crashing into our home world 13 years later in September 2019.

With that date looming, experts at ESA and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) decided to take another look at 2006 QV89 this month, and used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a ground-based observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile, to peer through space at the hurtling rock.

And guess what: they couldn’t find the bloody thing. Tracking asteroids is surprisingly tricky, you know, especially when they’re newly discovered and their orbit paths are not yet confirmed, as is the case of QV89. It's hard to pinpoint where they are in the vast obsidian void, especially more than a decade after they are first seen. Still, as we'll explain in a minute, the boffins persisted in their search because 2006 QV89 is a fairly worrying size.

[...] Since near-Earth asteroid QV89 was observed for just ten days 13 years ago – the same year Twitter was created and no-one outside Apple had yet heard of the iPhone – you can forgive the astronomers for being unable to find the thing in their telescopes this month. However, they didn't give up: by simulating the orbital mechanics of 2006 QV89, they identified the area of space the asteroid would have to travel through if it was to have a serious chance of hitting Earth. And nothing at all was seen in that region: so, no asteroid in that area means no real chance of it hitting our planet. Fingers crossed. [...]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @01:12PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @01:12PM (#869919)

    I see many statements to the similar above. But really, truly, if it was going to hit.. can you imagine them saying "We're all fucked!"

    I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to not spend the next 2 months with insanity ruling the land. Many people can take this sort of thing calmly, but there is a certain percentage of society that's already right on the brink of fuck all madness.

    And even if you take it well, are you going to want to go to work every day, for the last 2 months of your life?

    Supply chains would break down, food would be a problem in cities, and anarchy would emerge just because people wanted to eat.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 22 2019, @01:32PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 22 2019, @01:32PM (#869931) Journal

    It's pretty clear at this point that humanity is not going to be wiped out by a large asteroid within the next century or three. We may see a worse-than-Chelyabinsk incident that could kill thousands, but within the next decade or two we will be able to detect that kind of event in advance, possibly allowing enough time for city-wide evacuations. Then over the next century, we will see asteroid mining as an economic activity and even better asteroid detection. We'll deflect potential impactors and make a profit off of them at the same time.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]