tHa_KhAn

http://www.planetary.org/programs/pr...s_competition/

Courtesy of Slashdot.

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Ferris Bueller

Interesting ideas. I also found it interesting that of the three that won, the idea taking first place had the least amount of equipment for studying the asteroid. For something as potentially threatening as Apophis (scientists have already projected that an impact from Apophis would be an extinction level event), I would think they would want as much data as possible.

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|TG-6th|Ferris Bueller

Gillespie

Apophis is extinction level? I could've sworn it was just, uh... well, it would've rendered coastal habitations on the Pacific a bad place to live due to immense tsunamis. Well, if the probable impact location proved to be true. If it hit.

Which I hope it doesn't.

At least Apophis' impact probability was downgraded according to NASA's asteroid tracking site.

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Ferris Bueller

It's 1/4 mile long (430m by spectrographic estimate), making it as big as an aircraft carrier. According to a recent special I watched on the discovery channel, it's esitmated that the event that killed the dinosaurs was cause by a meteor less than half that size (contradictory to initial reports that it was 5-6 miles wide, they now postulate due to the extreme iridium content of the area that it was relatively small and just immensely dense). Hell, the crater in Arizona is estimated to have been caused by a meteor half the size of a football field (50m).

So a relatively small meteor caused these effects:
So imagine a metwor 8x that size slamming into the earth. Depending on where it would hit and what it is composed of, Apophis could cause damage on a scale that most people cant understand because they havent seen it. An oceanic impact could create tsunamis that would wipe out hundreds of coastal and inland cities. If it hit land, scientists estimate that it could create a crater roughly 50-60 miles wide (thank you popular science) and spew billions of tons of ejecta into the atmosphere, potentially darkening the skies for as long as 10-15 years.

Now, I'm not really afraid of it. If it's going to hit us, its going to hit us, and theres relatively little that I can do about it personally. But things that much smarter people have developed, such as gravity tractors, have the ability to alter it's trajectory and hlep it avoid the "keyhole". It's not so much the ones we know about that scares me, its the ones we dont. Waking up one morning to a surprise of ashen black skies and the knowledge that sub zero temperatures and poisoned air are in my immediate future isnt exactly on my to-do list.

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|TG-6th|Ferris Bueller

Birdman1011395

I can't remember but is Apophis the next asteroid to have to shoot through a keyhole in Earth's immediate future?

Because I remember watching on the history channel that the "most dangerous asteroid" is going to pass between the Earth and the moon and might be effected by Earth's gravity.

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BF 2142:|TG-Irr| Birdman10113
CoD4: |TG-Irr|Birdman

Let's put the badges here...

ScratchMonkey

An excellent novel describing such an event is Pournelle and Niven's Lucifer's Hammer. Another is James P. Hogan's Cradle of Saturn.

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Ferris Bueller

Yeah, Apophis will be passing below the level of earth orbiting satellites in 2029 (closest pass, it does make several other passes before that). At that time, it has the possibility of passing through a keyhole in earths gravitational field that would increase the chances for an impact in 2035-2037 exponentially. The current chances are 0.00012% on April 13, 2036 with lower chances on the same day in 2035 and 2037.

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|TG-6th|Ferris Bueller

Long Bow

Wait, I though Apophis was a founder/game officer here? Now your saying he does all this from space, is as big as an aircraft carrier and may kill us all? Great, I'm revoking my SM then.

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ScratchMonkey

I'm trying to imagine the funny hats his priesthood must wear....

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