Doom Asteroid Of 2036

NASA initially estimated the energy that Apophis (The Asteroid) would have released if it impacted Earth as the equivalent of 1480 megatons of TNT (114,000 times the energy from the nuclear bomb Little Boy, dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan). A more refined later estimate was 850 megatons. The impacts which created the Barringer Crater or caused the Tunguska event are estimated to be in the 10-20 megaton range. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was the equivalent of roughly 200 megatons.


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What is your opinion on this matter, or what do you think may happen?


I think it's all made up for a publicity act.

It would be our luck in trying to divert the asteriod, we made sure it hit us due to a confusiion about emperial and metric units.

I don't think it would really be that bad. It's probably a lot littler then they made it out to sound. It may even just splash in the ocean. They haven't been good at predicting things, so why would they be right now?

I'm not an "authority" on this subject by any means, but if it hits land I don't think the results would be very desirable.Wasn't there something about a meteor a few years back that never end up hitting, or is this an update on that?

possibly

Well it still passed by earth (the one froma couple years ago) at like 200k kilometers. A little closer than the moon orbits the earth. In astranomical terms, that was a graze. I think a lot of this has to do with funding. While the risk of an asteriod impact exists, we do have the resources that if push came to shove we could do something about it despite what the experts say. This report is by a bunch of scientists that want to test out their "Gravity Tractor" and see if the idea would work. It's a cool idea in the world of physics, but frankly doesn't have that "cool and sexy" feel that say using a nuclear warhead would. I have a better idea, use the money to fund more asteriod finding missions from ground based observatories so that we have a few years to figure something else. So long as we have more than about 6 months, we can think of something and probably several ideas. (Try A, plan B is use lots of nukes)

Well as far as I know, we haven't really had any (or even close to) major problems with anything outside of our atmosphere. So at this point in time I highly doubt that all of a sudden were going to see large pieces of rock smashing into our planet and taking out alot of things with it.I could be wrong though, but if not, how necessary is the research? (aside from learning more which isn't a bad thing).

This news is pretty old, scientists have been talking about it since around 2000.

 

They've came up with a new idea for diverting the asteroid, if it ever comes to Earth. It is a gravity tractor, that is designed to send the rock off course.

 

 

Here's a more recent article found at CBC.CA:

 

Beware of ApophisâŚ.or not

Should we act now to avoid doomsday?

February 20, 2007

By Daniel Lak, CBC News

 

We have been warned. Apophis is coming.

 

We even have the exact date: April 13, 2036, so there's no excuse not to be ready.

 

Apophis is a 320-metre-long asteroid with a slightly wonky orbit that brings it close to Earth every now and then. You guessed it. That April day 29 years from now is when our planet and Apophis might be in the same place at the same time.

 

The warning comes from scientists and ex-astronauts at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. The same group is also calling for the United Nations to co-ordinate a global response to incoming celestial flak. There's even an "Oregon-based risk analysis company" warning that entire cities could be annihilated by Apophis.

 

Scary stuff. Anyone who's watched Bruce Willis save the planet in the movie Armageddon or sat through the even sillier Deep Impact will get the point. The time for action is now.

 

Or is it? Is Apophis really going to squelch into Venice, flatten Los Angeles or leave Mumbai at the bottom of a deep crater?

 

A wary eye on space

 

Statistically speaking, it's probably not going to hit us. NASA's Ames Research Centre in California keeps a wary eye on objects that stray close to Earth's orbit. Several hundred asteroids, comets and other chunks of celestial matter are monitored pretty closely and many thousands more are thought to be out there.

 

But NASA recently downgraded the threat of a direct hit by Apophis from one in 42 to one in 45,000.

 

Those are pretty long odds. Getting four of a kind in a poker game is eleven times more likely, for example. Getting struck by lightning in the next five years is about as likely as Apophis hitting Earth in 2036, according to Prof. Fred Hoppe of McMaster University's mathematics department.

 

Long-suffering Toronto Maple Leaf fans will cringe to hear Hoppe's estimate that the chances of a collision with Apophis are about the same as the current Stanley Cup drought in Toronto lasting until 2324, presumably long after the impact of the asteroid wipes out our species. Not a nice thought.

 

Seriously though, we do get smacked by space rocks on a fairly regular basis. Almost every day, a meteorite streaks through the atmosphere and actually hits us â usually a harmless splash in the oceans that cover three-quarters of our planet. Every week or so, one hits land and occasionally thumps into a building or even a person.

 

Bigger, more potentially disastrous celestial body impacts happen much less frequently. In 1908, a comet or an asteroid apparently exploded over Tunguska in Siberia, a blast heard and seen for hundreds of kilometres. There's the famous Arizona meteor crater, a kilometre-wide hole thought to have been made by a piece of cosmic iron ore just 100 metres in diameter. Sudbury's nickel deposits come from one of the largest space objects to hit the Earth and a crater that lies under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is thought to have come from a meteor strike that is thought to have caused the extinction of most dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

 

The threats are out there

 

So it's no laughing matter, this asteroid business. Apophis orbits the sun roughly parallel to the Earth and it's much bigger than the meteor that left Arizona's famous hole. Its orbit intersects with Earth roughly every six years. An impact might be unlikely but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. And there are dozens, if not hundreds of other pieces of rock just like Apophis, out there, orbiting in relative darkness. Any number of them could be hurtling towards us and we just haven't noticed yet. We might not until it's too late.

 

There is merit in being prepared. But let's examine what they were calling for in San Francisco recently. Ex-shuttle astronaut Edward Lu says we need to build something called a "gravity tug," a space version of those stubbly little boats that pull massive ships in and out of port. It would only cost $300 million (US), he says.

 

The idea is to position a rocket ship or a satellite near the orbiting Apophis and use its tiny but significant gravitational pull to deflect the oncoming asteroid. I don't know about you but I'm not sure that's enough protection for me. Something a little more interventionist might be necessary, just to keep up morale on Earth.

 

Then there's the Bruce Willis option â blowing up the asteroid with a massive nuclear device. It may be a bit Hollywood to send up a Texas oil drilling team, as they did in Armageddon, to plant the nuke deep inside. A big space missile might just be enough. But wait, says Vancouver-based astronomer David Dodge, blowing up Apophis might just transform a single threat from space into a swarm of them.

 

"It's the last thing you want to do," he told CBC Newsworld.

 

Connect the dots

 

Denis Grey of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada sounds a note of caution. Apophis isn't likely to hit us, he says. Much depends on the quality of information astronomers have, and when we first started hearing about this latest threat to our planet, we just didn't know enough to say for sure.

 

"It's like connect the dots," he says. "You can't call it a face with just a few dots. Now we know. We have all the dots on Apophis."

 

It is statistically almost certain that the asteroid won't hit us in 2036, or even six years after that when scientists are already warning of a rematch. Besides, all sorts of things could cause similar levels of havoc well before then â climate change, pandemic disease, nuclear war and toxic food come to mind.

 

We live in fearful times. Do we really need something else to be afraid of? Before we start a "war against asteroids," perhaps we need more information and a thoroughly informed debate. Not to mention the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup.

Source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

 

xboxrulz

Frankly, I'm doubting these scientists are telling us the truth. They want to test out a new gizmo rather than actually caring about the likelyhood of this thing hitting us. Even if it were going to hit us, and we launched a nuke at it, the smaller pieces would be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere than actually hit, and those that did hit, only 1 in 4 would hit land, and only 1 in 28.5 would hit a city (3.5% of Earth's land is urban area). Volcanic activity on Earth has been much more destructive than any meteors.

True, it's probably better overall to let the whole thing hit than risk it splitting and potentially damaging multiple places and causing even more problems that will take longer to deal with *shrugs*.I dunno, maybe I just think it would be easier to clean one big mess in a single area then a whole heap of smaller messes lol.

Thanks for posting these articles. Honestly I hadn't heard of this asteroid until just now. I can't get over how incredibly....crazy it would be to have an asteroid hurling through the Earth's atmosphere, and to know that it could potentially wipe out cities or even more! But yes, I agree that we seem to already be worried enough as it is with things like terrorism and global warming, that we probably shouldn't focus too much of our attention to freaking out about an asteroid that may or may not come close or hit us. Amazing to think that there's still a possibility it could collide with the Earth though. Wow, that would be a mixed up day....if I even managed to survive. : (

Frankly, I'm doubting these scientists are telling us the truth. They want to test out a new gizmo rather than actually caring about the likelyhood of this thing hitting us. Even if it were going to hit us, and we launched a nuke at it, the smaller pieces would be more likely to burn up in the atmosphere than actually hit, and those that did hit, only 1 in 4 would hit land, and only 1 in 28.5 would hit a city (3.5% of Earth's land is urban area). Volcanic activity on Earth has been much more destructive than any meteors.

I spoke to my physics teacher (who's also a space fanatic) and she said that we don't have the capability to even launching a nuke in space. Not even remotely close.

xboxrulz

But did she explain why?None us can really say yes or no without any reason or explanation as to how either way would or wouldn't work.

I spoke to my physics teacher (who's also a space fanatic) and she said that we don't have the capability to even launching a nuke in space. Not even remotely close.
xboxrulz

Our missiles may currently not be capable of being launched into space, but already ICBMs enter sub-orbit, and it wouldn't be too hard to simply load a nuke onto a larger rocket that is capable of exiting the atmosphere.

Always be careful with teachers, they are taught to think inside the box, never outside the box, and so I've had many that won't even consider the simplest alternative that would work.

I think that there can be some destruction as the asteroid is very big. I just Think! but I don't know exactly. No one knows, only God knows.