Asteroid!

What are you planning to do Tuesday, November 8 at around 7:30 p.m. (CST)?  You might want to look up.  In the night skies over your head an asteroid will be coming closer to the Earth than the moon itself.  Asteroid 2005 YU55 is the largest close-approaching asteroid on record.  Essentially, it will be a passing between the orbit of the Earth and the moon.  This is the astronomical equivalent of a bow shot. 

            This asteroid is not going to hit the Earth.  That is good.  Both asteroids and meteors have hit the Earth before.  The extinction of the dinosaurs was precipitated by an asteroid hitting near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico about 65 million years ago.  One hundred years ago an asteroid exploded in the atmosphere above Tunguska in Russia, leveling 2000 square kilometers of Siberian forest.  Meteor Crater, just off I-40 near Winslow, Arizona, was formed 50,000 years ago when a part of an asteroid traveling 26,000 miles per hour hit the Earth.  As the song writer said, “When an irresistible force such as you, meets an old immoveable object like me, something’s gotta give,…”

These asteroids are bad actors and need to be targeted because they are too small and too dim (they produce no light of their own, only reflecting light from the sun, just like the Earth and moon) to be easily seen.  They also travel very, very fast.  Tuesday’s asteroid visited our neck of the woods in 1976, but went undetected.  It is only about a quarter mile across—yet we have never had anything this big come this close to us before.  How big a mess could it make if it hit us?  An asteroid the size of a house would do as much damage as the bomb that hit Hiroshima.  One the size of a 20 story building would destroy any major city in the United Sates and an asteroid a mile wide would probably end most life on this planet.  Such an asteroid, named Apophis, will pass by, but miss, the Earth in 2029.  

Yes, asteroids have hit the Earth and they have destroyed animal life, human life and both natural and man-made creation.  But for a collision to happen now, with our tightly packed, humanly stressed, interdependent economy would be much more serious than it ever has been in the past.  To this point, the Planetary Society launched the Apophis Mission Design competition.  It offered $50,000 to discover and track Near Earth Objects.  Apophis will approach us in 2029 closer than our geostationary satellites.  Wow!  I will be 83 that year, but I’m looking forward to that show.  The Apophis Mission Design competition produced useful results from 37 participants from 20 countries on 6 continents.  This is private money, personal initiative and productive competition at its best.  You can’t get innovation from a governmental bureaucracy because a bureaucracy, by definition, thrives on the status quo.  You can’t maintain your course and change direction at the same time!

If you have a 6 inch or better telescope and a skilled astronomer (Tom will have his 17 1/2 inch diameter telescope out), you will probably be able to see our fly by asteroid on Tuesday night.  It will be dim, a magnitude 11.2 (magnitude of night time objects get brighter as they approach 1).  But it is a reminder that we live in a crowded solar system, filled with things over which we have no control.  We are neither the biggest, baddest or boldest thing out there. 

Watch the skies, and keep the faith. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more