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Asteroid on Course to Earth Was Spotted Just Hours Before It Hit The Atmosphere
Witnesses reported a fireball streaking across the sky above Botswana on Saturday night. The asteroid hurtling toward Earth at 10 miles (16 km) a second looked like it could be the harbinger of catastrophe. A webcam in a rural area west of Johannesburg captured it, showing a luminous orb igniting the sky in a bright flash.
NASA had only discovered the asteroid on Saturday and determined it was on a collision course for the planet, charted for entry in a vast expanse from Southern Africa and across the Indian Ocean to New Guinea and given the name 2018 LA.
The reality of the asteroid's fiery end was less dramatic than the video shows. The asteroid was estimated at just six feet (1.8 metres) across, otherwise known as boulder-sized, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. It burned up "several miles" above the Earth's surface.
2018 LA aka ZLAF9B2 (25-35 tons).
2014 AA (40 tons).
2008 TC3 (80 tons).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @01:29PM (2 children)
The news item is accurate. This is only the third asteroid in human history that has been detected in space before slamming into Earth. This could be taken as a testament to our improving capabilities: now we can detect even tiny objects that have a high probability of impact. However, because the interval between detection and impact is so small, and there are so many small asteroids, we get an immediate test of the accuracy of our predictions.
With improvements in telescopes, we can get earlier and earlier warnings of Chelyabinsk-level impacts, and prevent possible deaths. Impact events could be detected to the hour/day of impact years in advance, unlike tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc.
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(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday June 08 2018, @02:41PM (1 child)
It was a good find, it is accurate, but it is also over-hyped as written. A fireball you can see is not something to worry about, often enough to make that a certainty, even though it is amazing. (Pre-Chelyabinsk, what was the most prior meteorite event that caused impactor damage on any significant scale?) But you have to get deeper into the story to get to, "this wasn't one to worry about."
I agree that it is a field worthy of study and needs expansion. Hopefully the geographic prediction capability will also improve beyond arcs of 7,700 miles which to my mind has questionable predictive value. (Yeah, if you're somewhere between the West Coast of the US and the East Coast of the US, twice over, you had better be prepared for a problem on Tuesday...)
But qualitatively, that this was detected before impact to Earth doesn't carry any more weight than the 15,000 plus NEO's that have also been cataloged. (Or the 30 or so per month that are added to the registry). That doesn't mean funding shouldn't be improved, it's a cool story and interesting, and that there isn't risk that can be mitigated by continuing to improve our space defense capability. But also even though a big event could happen that causes mass casualties from a local to global scale, it hasn't happened often in any well-documented way, either. [gizmodo.com]
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday June 08 2018, @04:04PM
I think you know the answer.
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