An asteroid just missed us!

[a35362]

Shall I share this with you? Not for the very sensitive, I guess.

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/09/09

The music is cool.

[Cheshire_Human]

A much better version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB7IHNnyJ00

The music is cooler…

[AK84]

@Anne_Neville

That I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody does.

The number I’ve heard quoted for causing global, rather than merely local, effects (presumably ignoring scenarios like setting off supervolcanoes or being mistaken for a nuclear weapon) is 1 km in diameter. An asteroid smaller than that hitting Earth could cause devastating damage on a local scale, or tsunamis that would spread over the oceans as tsunamis do, but wouldn’t cause a global impact winter.

How big an asteroid would have to be to hit the ground would depend on the composition of the asteroid. Iron meteorites the size of marbles have been found.

Won’t it matter where the asteroid hit? Say it hits in the middle of Australia as opposed to the Mid Atlantic.

[billfish678]

@Cheshire_Human

A much better version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB7IHNnyJ00

The music is cooler…

Now that was funny.

[a35362]

So, like, just to ask the question: could we shoot an asteroid with an ICBM (or a lot of ICBMs) to break it up into less-lethal chunks?

[Projammer]

Does anyone know where this one could have hit us if it were on an intercept path? Too close to the edge and it would have skipped out or burned because it had too much atmosphere to pass through.

So which country would have eaten it? Or gotten splashed by the tsunami if it hit water?

[Anne_Neville]

@a35362

So, like, just to ask the question: could we shoot an asteroid with an ICBM (or a lot of ICBMs) to break it up into less-lethal chunks?

That’s not what you want to do, unless you can get the asteroid when it’s far enough away that some (better, all) of the chunks will miss the Earth. If you break up the asteroid, you spread out the impact to multiple areas, which might make things worse. A lot of little impacts are at least as bad as one big impact, and some scientists think they might be worse.

A nuclear bomb might not be terribly effective at breaking up some asteroids due to their size, composition, or texture. See the first chapter of Phil Plait’s Death from the Skies for much more on this.

Also, you’d want one of the kind of rockets we use to launch things into space, not an ICBM, which is designed to launch things to other places on Earth. An ICBM probably couldn’t go fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity, since that’s not what they’re designed to do.

[AClockworkMelon]

@Anne_Neville

That’s not what you want to do, unless you can get the asteroid when it’s far enough away that some (better, all) of the chunks will miss the Earth. If you break up the asteroid, you spread out the impact to multiple areas, which might make things worse. A lot of little impacts are at least as bad as one big impact, and some scientists think they might be worse.

But if they’re broken up into little pieces wouldn’t that mean that it’d be easier for the atmosphere to burn up?

[Anne_Neville]

@AClockworkMelon

But if they’re broken up into little pieces wouldn’t that mean that it’d be easier for the atmosphere to burn up?

Yes, but you still get the heat in the atmosphere, which does bad things on that kind of scale. The whole sky basically becomes a broiler, that sort of thing.

[a35362]

@Anne_Neville

That’s not what you want to do, unless you can get the asteroid when it’s far enough away that some (better, all) of the chunks will miss the Earth…

We don’t have any rockets that can do this, do we? At least, nothing that could be “scrambled” in the short time we would have (a few days? a couple of weeks?) to notice such an object and figure out an intercept path.

So, we’re screwed.