Asteroid Apophis Heading Towards Earth! Contingency Plans Being Developed By United Nations!

just in the news that a 13 year old german schoolboy corrected NASAs odds of 1/450,000 odds of it hitting earth to 1/450. (really inspires your confidence in NASA no?).

www.physorg.com...
www.theage.com.au...

second article has the same story w/o the snazzy pictures

note how it says it will hit earth if it changes trajectory and not possibility

reply to post by Fibonacci11235


Amazing isn't it? A 13 year old trashing the mathematical calculations of NASA scientists! You're right! Doesn't instill confidence in all that's NASA!

And then, this is what I found interesting in that article you linked:

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second, at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth - and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres. If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit Earth on its next orbit in 2036.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with Earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

'Nuclear winter'?? That's curtains!

reply to post by mikesingh


Mike, excellent thread, as informative as always- congrats on the master status as well



That said- I really do not think its gonna matter because we are not going to be here to see it. Sorry to disappoint and I am not crapping on your research- but we are in the end game.

JMHO

Hi dk! Thanks!

OK, we may not be here till then. But how about our kids? If something's gonna happen, then don't you feel sad for them?

[edit on 16-4-2008 by mikesingh]

Hi MikeSingh.

Watched this video about Apophis and was hoping that maybe its path in the year 2036 was debunk somewhere. Is it?

If we are going to the expense of deflecting asteroids, we should be capturing them.

Many are Nickle Iron. Any material in space is an extremely valuable resource. If only as a radiation shield for future missions. If you caught a comet that is made of a lot of water. They should be working on braking and steering rockets to capture asteroids, a cosmic Catchers Mitt.

reply to post by pc is here


heard missile silos at carnaby yorkshire on standby. americans putting missiles in to north korea & iran to try to deflect asteroid

A possible process to deflect a comet or asteroid
A Rocket engine
A Rocket engine is no more than a tube, a plug at one end and a fast burning fuel.
A possible way to deflect an astral body
A comet might be easier than a metal asteroid as the initial process might take a longer time to complete than the time to impact.
First issue: Who and what needs to be involved
The first issue is to arrive on the astral body with the necessary equipment in time to affect a resolution. To do this it will be necessary to have the equipment and vehicles located in space at several space stations around the earth. To do this it will be necessary for every nation to participate in this endeavor, as it will take the whole of the earth resources to setup and man the station.
Second Issue: When and how will this work
This must be done immediately, waiting only puts us in a tighter time constraint. Once the station has been setup in space, it will be necessary to have this station manned at all times with observers, flight crews and the men that will be doing the actual work on the astral body.
Final issue: How to deflect the Astral Body
If a large tunnel/hole is cut to the approximate center of the astral body and it has been packed with spent fuel rods and an initial igniter the center of the astral body could be heated up enough to melt the center of the astral body. When enough heat is created, a Rocket Engine Action would take effect blowing out the tunnel/hole that was dug. The rocket engine effect would not destroy the asteroid but could give it enough of a nudge to move its trajectory…

Those odds are about the same as the odds of being a cashier at a grocery store and getting robbed.

Personally, I know several people who've been cashiers and been robbed.

Not so slim.

Originally posted by Buck Division
Not that Wikipedia is the end all, by any means.

But according to them this asteroid has one chance in 40 thousand of hitting the earth. Pretty slim odds.

I remember reading about Apophis in the regular papers around 2004. It made quite a sensation.

Wikipedia sounds correct to me. For example, the discussion of the "keyhole" affect is very lucid (and discounted.)

Here is the Wikipedia article.

Am I the first to link to this article, or was this mentioned already?

(Edited to get the odds correct.)

[edit on 1-2-2008 by Buck Division]

Originally posted by Cyberbian
If we are going to the expense of deflecting asteroids, we should be capturing them.

Many are Nickle Iron. Any material in space is an extremely valuable resource. If only as a radiation shield for future missions. If you caught a comet that is made of a lot of water. They should be working on braking and steering rockets to capture asteroids, a cosmic Catchers Mitt.

I love you.

Smash them into Mars. We have plans to go there. To get it to warm up, we need to create a greenhouse effect. Smashing big rocks into it is a great way to jump start that for Terraforming.

Nothing gets a capitalists blood roiling like sole access to literally a planet's worth of resources in a couple of square miles. Let the race begin.

Apophis
is a near-Earth asteroid that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 because initial observations indicated a small probability (up to 2.7%) that it would strike the Earth in 2029. Additional observations provided improved predictions that eliminated the possibility of an impact on Earth or the Moon in 2029. However, a possibility remained that during the 2029 close encounter with Earth, Apophis would pass through a gravitational keyhole, a precise region in space no more than about 600 meters across, that would set up a future impact on April 13, 2036. *Snip*

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[edit on 8/28/2010 by semperfortis]

China Reveals Solar Sail Plan To Prevent Apophis Hitting Earth in 2036

Nobody knows how close Apophis will come on that pass. But if there's a chance of a collision, we'll have only 7 years to work out how to avoid catastrophe.

Today, Shengping Gong and pals at Tsinghua University in Beijing say they've come up with a plan that will ensure Apophis never returns to Earth on this timescale .

They point out that keyholes are tiny, in this case just 600 metres wide. So deflecting Apophis by only a small amount in the near future will ensure it misses the keyhole and so cannot return to Earth.

There are various ways to deflect an asteroid. Gong and pals say their preference is to use a solar sail to place a small spacecraft into a retrograde orbit and on collision course with Apophis. The retrograde orbit will give it an impact velocity of 90km/s which, if they do this well enough in advance, should lead to a collision large enough to do the trick.

Putting a spacecraft into a retrograde orbit about the Sun using little or no fuel is a pretty neat trick by anyone's standards.. The Chinese team's calculations demonstrate the point. They show that a 10 kg sail in retrograde orbit, that hits Apophis a year before 2029, would deflect it enough to miss the keyhole, thereby eliminating the chance that the asteroid will return in 2036.

And such a mission ought to be relatively cheap and relatively easy to deploy.

I just hope they know what they're doing. There's still time, maybe a new technology some time in the future?

China saving euro this days... China saving world tomorrow... very indicative

can you link the UN document so we can read it please?