Space Weather

[Aelin]

A touch a femininity for box-office 
It's a good film, with humour. But Mire but fall on Paris here 

[thelufias]

  Yes it did, didn't it .....   Good Picture today on the BING daily photo.  A Bridge in France...but one that I haven't seen before over a Valley.  I'll see if I can find the name of it....but it's a WOW photo.

[sidherose]

Few people realize that asteroids and comets have the potential to be far more deadly than any atomic bomb or any volcano. From WikiP and to wit re the Chicxulub impactor:

"Researchers at the University of Glasgow dated rock and ash samples from the impact to 66,038,000 ± 11,000 years ago.

The impactor had an estimated diameter of 10 km (6.2 mi) and delivered an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT.... By contrast, the most powerful man-made explosive device ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of only 50 megatons of TNT ... making the Chicxulub impact 2 million times more powerful. Even the most energetic known volcanic eruption, which released an estimated energy equivalent of approximately 240 gigatons of TNT ... and created the La Garita Caldera, delivered only 0.24% of the energy of the Chicxulub impact."

Not to mention, they obviously haven't read Revelations or if they have they're still waiting for a 'dragon' to show up in the sky. Rolls eyes.

Then again, what're you going to do about it if one does hit us? Not much.

[thelufias]

You are so right.....  But as you said...unless they come up with better tracking and ways to divert....we might as well open up an umbrella for protection because it will do as good as anything else we now have 

[sidherose]

You are so right.....  But as you said...unless they come up with better tracking and ways to divert....we might as well open up an umbrella for protection because it will do as good as anything else we now have 

We don't often 'discover' them coming far enough away to have time to do anything about them. We had a whole week on this last one. If one were to be 'blown up' well we'd just end up with (as Aelin put it) 'babies' or worse destructive 'teenagers' of medium size and we would have absolutely no way to predict where they'd go, or worse yet there's always the return trip. With them it's definitely 'What goes around, comes back around."

I think it's interesting this one DID 'have a baby'. What caused that to happen? Is anyone asking? What if a rather large one that was going to miss us decided to spawn a 'child' of considerable size?

We're too busy pouring money into and making more money off of blowing each other up to be bothered with developing a decent Early Detection system. There are some other space cameras going up soon though that may help out.   

[thelufias]

Normally it means something bounced into the main mass and a piece splintered off.  Which means something else is close to us also.  But not big enough to spot.  At the speeds they travel it doesn't have to be big to cause a splinter. 

And I agree on your analogy.  Why worry about space rocks killing us when we can do the job better on our own.

[sidherose]

Normally it means something bounced into the main mass and a piece splintered off.  Which means something else is close to us also.  But not big enough to spot.  At the speeds they travel it doesn't have to be big to cause a splinter. 

Well, that was my thought too - that something else must have hit it and caused the 'baby' one. But what?

[thelufias]

From Spaceweather.com

METEORITE SKEPTICISM: Reports are circulating of a meteorite strike in Nicaragua on Sunday, Sept. 7th. Because the timing coincides with the flyby of asteroid 2014 RC, some reporters have suggested a link. We are skeptical. The crater outside Managua looks more like it was dug by a backhoe than excavated by a high-energy meteoritic explosion. Also, no streak of light corresponding to a meteor was actually observed. Stay tuned for updates on this developing story.

[thelufias]

And something new:

MORE ASTEROID NEWS: Now that 2014 RC has passed, another even weirder asteroid is approaching Earth's neighborhood. 2002 CE26 is a binary asteroid consisiting of a primary space rock 3.5 km in diameter and a secondary approximately one-tenth as wide. What's weird is, radar data suggest that the secondary space rock might have a moon of its own. Alberto Quijano Vodniza of the University of Narino Observatory in Colombia photographed the triple system streaking through the constellation Pegasus on Sept. 2nd:

[sidherose]

Hmmm, according to the report here the people nearby heard a blast and it registered on their 'equipment'  - don't know if that was a seismometer or not. I can't really tell if the 'impact crater' they show in the video is an artist's conception or the actual one. It may be an artist's conception - since the rest of the video seems to be. But there is still the blast they supposedly heard.

This new one will be just over a million miles from us, so that's good. That is pretty weird though - a 'binary asteroid' and the smaller one having a 'moon'.