So much for the "near miss" with the asteroid?

[Lothic]

never been safe, cant do much about it. When it happens, it will happen. In the mean time I'm just enjoying the ride until last call.

It's true we've always been "under the gun" of meteors coming along that could potentially wipe us out.  The difference now is that we nearly have the technology to spread the human race beyond the confines of this one, single planet.  It'd be cosmically ironic if we were to be wiped out now (after millions of years of evolution) just as we acquired the realistic means to save ourselves from an ELE.

Sadly given the general apathy of most of the world's governments I suspect we'll have to eventually suffer some major city/region being wiped off the face of the Earth by some random meteor before everybody accepts the unavoidable need to have a serious space colonization program.  Events like what happened in Russia the other day OUGHT to be enough to motivate the human race to get serious about going to space, but as we all know it'll soon be forgotten since it wasn't too disastrous - this time.

It's a simple question of economics: everyone knows it would cost billions (and then trillions) to establish colonies on the Moon or Mars so the governments of the world are willing to gamble between paying for a viable space program now versus waiting to see how much longer we can get away without having to pay for a meteor-based natural disaster.  Basically being able to scientifically predict the chances it'll inevitably happen isn't going to be good enough for the narrow-minded, short-term thinking politicians - I suspect millions will have to die before we finally make it a united global priority to spend trillions to go to space.

[FatherXmas]

The B612 Foundation is trying to raise money to put an infrared space telescope, Sentinel, into an orbit similar to Venus's looking out to spot asteroids coming from our blind side, toward the Sun.  We detected asteroids today by looking for a moving object across multiple photos looking at the same patch of sky.  Problem is we can only see them by the sunlight reflecting off of them so they have to be past our orbit for us to have any reasonable chance of seeing them.  By putting a telescope closer to the sun, the idea is to spot asteroids as the exceed the orbit of Venus but within ours.  By using an infrared telescope it eliminates the need that the asteroid reflects visible sunlight by allowing us to see it being warmed by the Sun.

As it is right now, we spot an uncomfortably high number of small asteroids days or hours before or after they pass us.  This can be a somewhat disconcerting site for the general public, Earth's Busy Neighborhood.  Note the number of up close asteroids that start with 2013 C or 2013 D were discovered this month and if they are on this site, are considered to be potentially hazardous Earth crossing ones.

Here's the official list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.  Lastly this is a movie showing the history of asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2011.  You can easily spot when we started trying to find them all.  Run it at the highest stream feed, the dots are rather small.

[Lothic]

The B612 Foundation is trying to raise money to put an infrared space telescope, Sentinel, into an orbit similar to Venus's looking out to spot asteroids coming from our blind side, toward the Sun.

This Sentinel telescope sounds like a good idea and I hope something "high-profile" like that happens to generate interest.  Perhaps if the general public starts becoming more aware about all the things that are actually flying around out there they'll take our overall need for activity in space a little more seriously.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Yeah, I read about that.  Very very interesting concept, and I approve of it.  And... frankly... sometimes I wonder if I should sign up.  Doubt they'd take me, being short, somewhat overweight, 45 and having a teensy bit of pre-hypertension.

And that whole "where's my shower and toilet?" in the morning.. that might be tough to deal with...

But I applaud their efforts, and sincerely hope they get good people to volunteer their lives for the greater good of mankind.  Because, waxin' poetic, that is nothing short of what it is, and it is a spectacular effort being thought about here.

Also, reading about this:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Building_a_lunar_base_with_3D_printing

Makes it quite hopeful that this can be done really really easy with Mars too, maybe.

/Humans, sometimes, they don't suck so bad.

When I heard about it, I thought that just a couple years prior I probably would've gone for it. These days... I'm married, and both my wife and I have health issues, and my once stone-cold attitude has been replaced with a great deal of anxiety over the years. Not a good combo for perpetually cramped quarters. Also, she and I, we're a lot of things. But breeders is not one of them. 

I've been wondering just how close we are to getting those 3D printers to be easily adaptable to utilize any kind of 'dust' material. The possibility of being able to build a base out of raw materials from anywhere is astounding.I still don't know how they expect to be able to fabricate the parts though. The size of the machines I've seen so far are way larger than the size of the items they can produce (maybe something 1/2 meter square). Unless they're planning on these structures being lego houses, I guess the printers are going to have to be very task-specific, so maybe something small can spit out I-beams, or whatever they have in mind for components.

And, heh, yes there's some good 'umies out there who care about furthering the "human adventure." But they're hard to find, as NASA points out here.  http://www.theonion.com/video/nasa-continues-search-for-planet-capable-of-suppor,30990/

[SerialBeggar]

[Mistress Urd]

Definitely not the whole 'roid anyhow, but the timing of this is hard to ignore. A fragment from the same asteroid though?

It'll be interesting if tomorrow we find out that instead of one asteroid, there's a bunch of smaller objects traveling along that orbit. Earth's gravity might have fractured it.

Another vid. http://news.yahoo.com/video/russian-meteorite-caught-tape-injuries-071827265.html

I think you watch too many Hollywood movies. 

[TimtheEnchanter]

I think you watch too many Hollywood movies. 

I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9  which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this.

Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'

Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.

[FatherXmas]

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...

2012 DA14 passed by the Earth roughly 16 hours after the Russian Meteor.  In 16 hours the Earth moved roughly one million miles.  One million miles to reach the point where DA14 crosses Earth's orbit from south to north (actually it never crossed the Earth's orbit, meaning the space the Earth occupies as is travels around the Sun, it just came REALLY close to it).

More importantly the path the meteor took over the planet was East to West with a slight North to South trajectory as well as coming from the directing of the rising sun, so it approached from the sun side of Earth's orbit where DA14 was coming in from the opposite side.

NASA article on their orbits.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Yeah, I accepted that after all the information was in. But still... I'd love to see someone draw up what the odds are of the closest pass of a large asteroid ever seen by man coinciding with the biggest meteor blast in over a century. Just... wow.

[Mistress Urd]

I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9  which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this.

Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'

Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.

It was also done in the movie "Meteor"

[houtex]

I was thinking of Shoemaker Levy 9  which was once a single comet until it passed Jupiter and ended up looking like this.

Which is probably exactly what they were thinking about when they decided to do the same thing in 'Armageddon.'

Edit: Come to think of it, I think the 'roid split up in 'Deep Impact' as well. But that might've been a direct result of an attempt to destroy it. Can't remember now. It's been too long.

Yes, it was.  It was a comet though, 'Wolf-Biederman'.  Part of the drama of the movie... lost a guy to an outgassing when the comet rotated out of 'night', and another guy got blinded by the sun due to not having his sheild down.  They planted a nuke, blew it, and it made a chunk called 'Biederman'.  That chunk, amazingly, was accelerated towards the earth, and was the size of Manhattan or something, and would impact the Earth several hours before 'Wolf' (the much bigger comet fragment left over)  It would not cause an ELE, but it was definitely not going to be pretty.  Wolf, though was still gonna cause an ELE.

Later in the movie, the Messiah was flown into a hole in the comet, nearer to it's heart (unlike the earlier nuke, which was a semi-near surface planting, but we're talking ice, so.. it should have made a slushy, but ice is really really hard in space) and the crew sacrificed the ship and themselves with a convenient second nuke they had on board, blowing up Wolf into so much crushed ice, mere hours, if not minutes, before impact.  the remaning ice particles (and likely metals, sure) would individually slam into the atmosphere, but burn up and not make it to the ground... mostly.

And by far, the better of the two disaster asteroid/meteor/comet movies that year.  Armageddon is the roughnecks in space silly movie, and with a meteor/asteroid.  Oh sure, similarly fantastical (at this time), and much more over the top.  Interesting note:  It is likely that had not there been 'scout' meteors in both New York (lots of little ones) and Paris (a fairly big one) the monter one would not have been detected until it was amazingly late in the game.  Please note that this is the likeliest scenario, no forewarning, much like the Russian meteor, we're not gonna know it's here until it's HERE 
 
At least with a comet, you can see it coming a ways out, it can't help itself.  Overall, Deep Impact was just so much more realistic in many ways, even if a bunch of hooey overall.   I liked it better because it was 'more correct', in a sort of fashion.

/Seriously? You're gonna put a nuke in the middle of the thing THAT CLOSE to earth and expect the halves to fly by?
//Riiight...  And that's not the only thing, but it's enough.
///Entertaining enough though, I still enjoyed it, just recognize it's hokey silly.

[FatherXmas]

Later in the movie, the Messiah was flown into a hole in the comet, nearer to it's heart (unlike the earlier nuke, which was a semi-near surface planting, but we're talking ice, so.. it should have made a slushy, but ice is really really hard in space) and the crew sacrificed the ship and themselves with a convenient second nuke they had on board, blowing up Wolf into so much crushed ice, mere hours, if not minutes, before impact.  the remaning ice particles (and likely metals, sure) would individually slam into the atmosphere, but burn up and not make it to the ground... mostly.

"Well, look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named after us. "

Actually they had quite a few bombs, not counting the ones they used for propulsion (it was a nuclear orion design).   They ran out of time and the ship was damaged before they could plant them all.  It's just one of the aspects of that film that kept the science within throwing distance of reality. 

The vast majority of nuclear weapons are well under the 1 megaton yield.  The biggest nuke the US ever set off was 15 MT and that yield was accidental while the USSR set off one 58 MT weapon just to say "see, mine's bigger than yours".

[TimtheEnchanter]

Aye, I thought Deep Impact was the better, more realistic film as well. Forget the majority picking up on that though. I've seen a lot of films that do a lot of unrealistic crap in them, but Armageddon actually made Star Wars space physics look good. The "shuttles docking with a spinning space station" scene is downright cringe-worthy. Sex with animal crackers just has more appeal I guess.

On the brighter side of things, we only have to endure 10 more years of narrowly-dodging deadly space objects until we get to find out what happens to an asteroid when we hit it with a chunk of metal.

http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-smashing-mission-picks-space-rock-target-053602953.html

[MindBlender]

I guess it's a good thing 2/3 of the earth is water, or we would be hearing about these events more often.