Incoming ‘Moby Dick' asteroid goes missing near Earth

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25086-incoming-moby-dick-asteroid-goes-missing-near-earth.html#.UwTl8tsZW1F

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

43 20 12 years ago

nextstep• 12 years ago

For comparison, the asteroid from the extinction level event which killed the dinosaurs was about 5 kilometers in diameter.

roc• 12 years ago

And the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk last year was estimated at 20m in diameter.

So 270m, while a long way off "catastrophic", is well into "serious".

greenyoda• 12 years ago

It could still be catastrophic. If it hit a large city, it could immediately wipe out millions of people. If it hit the ocean near the shore, it could create massive tsunamis. If it fragmented into tiny particles on impact or caused a huge firestorm, it could block out enough sunlight to cause a "nuclear winter" scenario:

"Similar climatic effects are believed to have followed large comet and asteroid impacts in the past, due to sulfate bearing rock being pulverized and lofted high into the air combined with the ignition of multiple forest firestorms, which is sometimes termed an impact winter..."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

JAFTEM• 12 years ago

Article says it was last seen 14 years ago, so it's obviously not some asteroid we've been monitoring too recently that just inexplicably disappeared like I, someone who doesn't know much about astronomy, assumed from the title. We apparently were just wrong in calculating its trajectory..

mathattack• 12 years ago

The "incoming" in the title suggests a trajectory aimed at grabbing eyeballs and clickthroughs. :-)

jneal• 12 years ago

As does "goes missing near Earth" I don't think going missing 14 years ago equates to going missing near Earth.

splat2• 12 years ago

Exactly, calculating trajectories (accurately) is very difficult. I did a summer project at JPL where we would take astrometric measurements of various minor planets (including Pluto) and then update the trajectories. Even a big, well studied object like Pluto could easily be an arcsecond or two away from where it was "supposed" to be. (For reference, at Pluto's distance, that would be ~30,000 km off.)

But it's also possible that it's right where it should be and is too faint to be detected. Asteroids are very hard to detect because they're faint and they move -- so you can't expose the image for a long time to detect a fainter image. All you would get would be a faint streak across the image.

ZoF• 12 years ago

Not if you moved the lens in time with the supposed trajectory.

Wonderdonkey• 12 years ago

This is really interesting because there seem to be two camps on this. A lot of stories are reporting the asteroid as missing, while others report pictures taken by the Dubai Astronomy Group. One of those camps has it very wrong. http://www.express.co.uk/news/science-technology/460471/Aste...

zellyn• 12 years ago

Every good SF reader knows that an asteroid that suddenly disappears is actually an alien spaceship. :-)

mturmon• 12 years ago

Here's a nice press release (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news182a.html) regarding the impact of a small NEO (2-3 meters in size) last month with Earth.

Being small, it was discovered only 21 hours before impact, and its sonic signature is believed to have been observed in the mid-Atlantic around Bermuda.

Larger asteroids with orbits that will come near Earth's are being discovered routinely by sky surveys (e.g., Catalina, http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/css_mission.html) as far away as Jupiter.

wslh2• 12 years ago

Are you joking? Yesterday it seems like a meteor impacted the province of Santa Fe in Argentina: http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/scientists-probe-meteor-...

Why nobody connected it with this "Moby Dick" ?

MrZongle2• 12 years ago

Because unless there's some proof, there's no reason to believe that the two events are related.

Case in point: last year's meteor event over Chelyabinsk, Russia took place shortly before a publicized close-pass of Earth by asteroid 367943 Duende. Many people quickly jumped to the conclusion that the two were related when, in fact, they were conclusively not.

wslh2• 12 years ago

It was not a conclusion just nobody pointed the provable connection.

Sorry you are wrong about the scientific method. The proof came later, the hypothesis first. If two improvable events came together it's worth the investigation beyond if the events are related at the end or not. When I said connection I meant two events happening at the same time.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

One of the ones that got away?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch'ing-yang_event

Incoming ‘Moby Dick' asteroid goes missing near Earth

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