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Thread: Close call? or Meh....
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07-26-2019, 04:09 PM #1
Close call? or Meh....
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...hTa?li=BBnb7Kz
On Thursday, an asteroid called 2019 OK, traveling at almost 15 miles a second, came unusually close to impacting Earth. The asteroid passed by about 43,500 miles away — closer to Earth than our moon is. It was one of the closest known approaches of an asteroid to Earth since we started closely tracking the movements of objects in space.
If you had binoculars and knew exactly where to look, you could have briefly seen 2019 OK in the sky.
NASA tracks large asteroids in order to identify any that might be on a threatening trajectory toward Earth. But 2019 OK was first seen a few days ago, and was only definitively identified as an asteroid yesterday — hours before it passed right by us.
How’d they miss it? Well, while 2019 OK could have done a lot of damage if we’d gotten very unlucky — as Swinburne University astronomer Alan Duffy told the Sydney Morning-Herald, the asteroid would have struck Earth with “over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima” — it’s not actually all that big. The asteroid is estimated to be “between 187 feet and 427 feet in diameter.” The largest passenger aircraft in service today (the Airbus A380-800) is about 240 feet long, so spotting this asteroid would have been a bit like spotting a single big commercial jet in the vast expanse of space — traveling at 15 miles a second and coming toward us directly from the sun, which makes spotting it more difficult.
Even a small asteroid like 2019 OK could potentially do a lot of damage if it’d hit Earth, rather than missing by 43,500 miles, but for it to be, as lots of outlets called it, a “city killer” asteroid, we would have needed several more unlikely things to go wrong. A 45,000-mile near-miss is very close compared to how vast space is, but it’s still a fair bit — Earth itself is about 8,000 miles across. About 0.5 percent of asteroids that come this close or closer will actually hit us.
And its not like Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck could have done much to save us.
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07-26-2019, 04:51 PM #2
Superman,game over.
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07-26-2019, 04:52 PM #3Funky But Chic
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I mean yeah close call, and also meh. Whaddaya gonna do? It's only 111 years since the Tunguska event, read up on that and imagine of it hit Los Angeles 2019 vs. Siberia 1908.
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07-26-2019, 04:59 PM #4
Can’t do shit about it so I would prefer you leave me in darkness if it does track on us.
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07-26-2019, 05:03 PM #5
Close only counts in horseshoes and grenadesriser4 - Ignore me! Please!
Kenny Satch - With pleasure
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07-26-2019, 05:06 PM #6watch out for snakes
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07-26-2019, 05:18 PM #7
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07-26-2019, 05:39 PM #8Registered User
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07-26-2019, 07:01 PM #9Registered User
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....... and empty the liquor cabinet.
Probably do that first.
Priorities, man.
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07-26-2019, 07:14 PM #10
anyone ever read Lucifer's Hammer by Niven/Pournelle. Hypothesizes this very event. Great read.
"fuck off you asshat gaper shit for brains fucktard wanker." - Jesus Christ
"She was tossing her bean salad with the vigor of a Drunken Pop princess so I walked out of the corner and said.... "need a hand?"" - Odin
"everybody's got their hooks into you, fuck em....forge on motherfuckers, drag all those bitches across the goal line with you." - (not so) ill-advised strategy
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07-26-2019, 07:42 PM #11Head down, push foreword
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Thanks Danno.
When I read the nuke holocaust book Alas Babylon by Pat Frank in the 4th grade it blew my mind. I’m gonna give your rec a go. I love that shit to this day.
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07-26-2019, 07:57 PM #12
My guess is they knew about it well in advance but given there are so many pussies out there nowadays NASA figured that if they made a big deal out of it this would push a shit load of them off the edge so they came up with the BS story the OP pulled from MSN.
The Sheriff is near!
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07-26-2019, 08:09 PM #13
I blame Obama
Merde De Glace On the Freak When Ski
>>>200 cm Black Bamboo Sidewalled DPS Lotus 120 : Best Skis Ever <<<
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07-26-2019, 08:18 PM #14
This is why we need SPACE FORCE.
Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums"Zee damn fat skis are ruining zee piste !" -Oscar Schevlin
"Hike up your skirt and grow a dick you fucking crybaby" -what Bunion said to Harry at the top of The Headwaters
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07-26-2019, 09:34 PM #15
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07-26-2019, 09:55 PM #16
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07-27-2019, 05:52 AM #17
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07-27-2019, 08:13 AM #18
NASA can land a probe on a comet when they've been tracking it long enough to plot the course. It's all this shit they haven't documented yet that can hit us with little or no warning. The moon has saved our asses several times. What's crazy is that even when they see it and track it for weeks, they still don't have the ability to say with 100% confidence if it will or won't hit the earth, much less WHERE it will hit. So, evacuating a city isn't really an option because they don't know who to evacuate before it's too late.
Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!
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07-27-2019, 08:28 AM #19
Seems like anytime there is a 1/120 chance of an event measured in atomic blast units that's pretty significant. The strong meh coming from MSN feels weird.
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07-27-2019, 04:13 PM #20
We should definitely be searching the solar system for these suckers. Imagine what we’d spend if we thought al-qaeda was going to shoot a 100 yard wide stone at America at 20 miles per second.
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07-27-2019, 06:42 PM #21
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07-27-2019, 08:17 PM #22
Close call? or Meh....
I couda bin kilt!
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07-27-2019, 08:39 PM #23Funky But Chic
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Chelyabinsk was approximately 20 meters across they say. Lots of rocks out there.
There was another asteroid getting all the attention for its close approach that day and then the Chelyabinsk one came in from another direction.
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07-27-2019, 09:02 PM #24
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07-28-2019, 07:03 AM #25
Look at it this way, maybe we take a hit in the middle of some nowhere desert. The impact throws up enough dust to balance out the warming the planet "seems" to be undergoing. Problem solved.
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