| Title | Icarus Won't Collide With Earth in 2015 - But It'll Be Close | |
| Date | Sunday March 29 2015, @07:17PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the celestial-billiards dept. | ||
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?
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printed from SoylentNews, Icarus Won't Collide With Earth in 2015 - But It'll Be Close on 2024-05-01 03:25:32