Asteroid Hits Earth! How the Doomsday Scenario Would Play Out

The speed of the object would make a difference too. Over the course of the past several months, 2012 DA14 has been clipping along at a brisk 17,450 mph (28,000 k/h), and that’s what packs it so full of energy. Just like a baseball that’s tossed lightly at your chest doesn’t hurt you but a fastball thrown by a pro player would crack your sternum, so too does velocity turn a nuisance rock into a unguided missile. But the speed of 2012 DA14, not to mention its angle of flight, saved our hides too. A difference of a few centimeters per second—faster or slower, depending on when and where the force was applied—would have been enough to shift the asteroid’s trajectory and put us in its crosshairs. A random bump from a smaller bit of space rubble could have done that trick, as could a gravity tug from a larger object the asteroid passed. So could the light of the sun.

Read more: [link to science.time.com]

, good post, 5

Solar energy becomes heat energy when it strikes an asteroid, and that can exert a physical force all its own. A rock with a bright surface reflects more light away and feels less of an effect. A darker surface absorbs more and gets nudged more. And solar flares—which occur unpredictably—can mix things up further, exerting a sudden pressure that compounds the sun’s the slow, steady one.

“Heat can push these bodies around,” says Paul Chodas, a research scientist in the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program Office at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “We can determine future trajectories out to about 100 years, but there are uncertainties like this that make it difficult to forecast as reliably for the smaller objects.” Asteroids that have traces of water—and in a cosmos as heavily hydrated as ours that’s not uncommon—can outgas tiny amounts of vapor, which act as small, natural thrusters that perturbs the flight path further. Given all of those x-factors, it’s hardly unreasonable to say that 2012 DA14 might have easily gotten nudged our way.


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the video on this site explains as it has already past us...

lol

The first word of the incoming missile would likely come from one of three main observatories NASA has assigned to scan the sky for cosmic ordnance all day, every day. But amateurs and academic observatories around the world could spot it too (it was an amateur who discovered 2012 DA14, in fact). We also might not see it at all. Like fighter planes taking advantage of natural blind spots in the sky, asteroids can approach from the direction of the sun, making them impossible to see until it’s way too late. “The smaller ones aren’t even visible until they’re on the way back out,” says Don Yeomans, head of the NEO office.

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But imagine we saw our 100-meter asteroid when it was, say, eight months away. NASA would first send out word to the rest of the world’s astronomers, who would begin training their telescopes on it too, something they do already even for benign rocks. They measure light output, rotation rate and trajectory, conducting their own plight-path calculations to help confirm what the NASA software is spitting out. Radio-telescopes at Goldstone Observatory in the Mojave Desert and the Aricebo Observatory in Puerto Rico would swing into position as well, bouncing signals off the rock to determine distance, velocity and doppler shift—or the stretching or compressing of the signals reflecting back to determine the degree to which the object is moving toward or away from the observer.

“There is a small army of worldwide professionals and amateurs doing this,” says Yeomans.


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Comet doom is superior to asteroid doom any day of the week.

The good thing about so much crowd-sourcing is that when hundreds or thousands of astronomers reach a conclusion, you can be pretty sure it’s a solid one. The bad thing is that when that conclusion is one you don’t like, there’s no court of appeal. In this case, let’s imagine that the conclusion is a truly bad one—that our football-field sized rock would be targeting a populated area. And for the sake of doomsday pizzaz, let’s make that populated area New York City.


The five boroughs that comprise the city have a total area of 469 sq. mi., including 164 sq. mi. of water, and are home to 8.3 million people. A rock barreling in from space would likely be made of some kind silicate—the overwhelming majority of asteroids are—which means it wouldn’t survive the blazing heat of entry intact and instead would explode in the sky. Trajectory analysts at NASA and elsewhere would be able to forecast the exact date, time, place and angle of entry, so imagine Central Park, at high noon, on a work day, at an angle of entry that maximizes the possible explosion.


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As it happens, we have a very good idea of how things would unfold in a situation like that since an extremely similar scenario played out before, on June 30, 1908, near the Tunguska River in Central Russia. At 7:14 that morning, a massive blast from what is calculated to have been a 100-meter asteroid occurred somewhere from 3 to 6 mi. (5 to 10 km) above the surface. The region was heavily forested and lightly populated—which was a very good thing—but the devastation was nonetheless stunning. Roughly 80 million trees were leveled or incinerated in a footprint of destruction extending 830 sq. mi. (2,150 sq. km). The energy released by the blast is estimated to have been 30 megatons—or 1,000 Hiroshimas.

Read more: [link to science.time.com]

They knew about this crap 47 years ago..k

THATS WHY THERE'S .......

An 830 sq. mi blast ring has a radius of 14.4 mi. (23.2 km). Position that over New York City and you’d have destruction reaching deep into Queens in the east and Staten Island in the South; west to Paterson and Montclair, NJ; and north to Yonkers and New Rochelle, NY. Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn would be swallowed whole. Evacuation in advance of the blast would be a massive challenge, since the array of bridges and tunnels that connect the boroughs are natural choke points. The many months of notice the residents would have before the big day arrived would make things a bit easier, but fleeing from an asteroid is very different from fleeing from other kinds of disasters. People evacuating in advance of, say, a hurricane can usually just load up their cars and go, since even after a superstorm like Katrina, most of them will simply be turning around and coming home. After a Tunguska-like blast, most people would not have any home left at all.

Read more: [link to science.time.com]

As with a nuclear blast, the devastation would be greatest at the epicenter of the event and fade the farther away you moved, and while there would be no radiation to contend with, the immediate destruction would be pretty much the same. In a 6.5 mi. radius, all that would be left of most buildings would be the foundations, though some sturdier, reinforced structures like stocky old banks might survive. Out to 11 or so miles, multi-story buildings would be skeletonized—their curtain walls stripped away and only their frameworks left standing. Small, individual family homes would be destroyed completely. It would not be until about 20 miles away that most tall buildings would survive—windowless, to be sure—and some single-family dwellings would too. The economic damage—nationally and globally—would be incalculable

Read more: [link to science.time.com]

I need to post this in all 2012 DA14 threads.

The asteroid velocity is 4.8-4.9 mph (7.8 kmh).

Earth escape velocity is 7 mph (11.2 kmh).

2012 DA14 passes UNDER geosincronic orbit, which means INSIDE Earth gravity field.


If it won't hit tomorrow, next year will either pass further away or have 100% hit chance.

If the 2012 DA14 orbit is modified tomorrow with about 3,500 miles (which is possible considering that NASA estimated his full orbit as being 368 days in 2012 and this year, after the fly by, to be 318 days) or a bit more, next year it will either pass at 20,000-20,000 miles distance or at 13,000-14,000 miles distance.

In the second very possible scenario (it's 50% chance) it will 100% hit, because it won't escape gravity.

Did you say.... 11.2 ??

Not that number again....

Yet, in over 50 years of space observation, they couldn't find an asteroid that passes EVERY god damn YEAR, and in our BACKYARD???

They know about 2012 DA14 for AT LEAST 20 years.It would be totally idiotic to say that they don't know about it, because it's not a damn PULSAR 12 billion LIGHT YEARS away !!!

Why they didn't tell us about it?

The answer is obvious.

nice math.......

hope it hits out in the ocean.......

maybe the creators way of dealing with Fuku/Japan...

Well, it is the escape velocity in kilometters per hour.

You can easily check it.

Last Edited by Recollector on 02/14/2013 12:32 PM

you cant handle the truth....

Thank you.

It is math combined with official data about DA14.

He's Talking about the Yarkovsky Effect. There is a Yarkovsky Candiadate in June 25-30 of this year. ATEN 2062. Yes its an Asteroid.

Watch: How to Save the Earth from Killer Asteroids by Using a Paintball Gun


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2013 the year of the ROIDS.........

This asteroid is not big enough to cause doomsday. Localized doom yes, but not worldwide.

[link to www.freeasteroids.org]

many more roids on there way...........


[link to www.youtube.com]