Keep watching the skies!
Sep. 6th, 2003 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI'm amazed that, having ridden on the 2003QQ47 bandwagon, the press is not yet getting itself worked up in a lather over my personal favorite killer asteroid, 2003QO104.
After all, it popped up on the risks page right after the other story subsided, and it still has the delicious first possible apocalypse date of May 20, 2006, shifted a mere few hours later than first reported. Also, the early impact probability estimate has grown a bit (it's now better than one in a billion), and the size estimate has gotten bigger! Projected yield now is three-quarters of a million megatons, which would pretty definitely be a major gut-punch to civilization.
There are a whole lot of other potential impacts, too, including early ones-- it looks to me like this guy is in some sort of resonant orbit with the Earth, with a period of almost exactly three years, though interesting things happen to the simulation possibilities further down the line as the periodic Earth encounters themselves vary the orbit. When the asteroid's actual behavior gets pinned down (and the collision risk probably eliminated) after a few more days of observations, it will no doubt be pigeonholed in some family of asteroids with a special dynamical relationship with our home.
So why no fuss? Of course, stories equivalent to this one happen several times a year, but this time it's right after another giant-asteroid fad. Could journalists actually be paying attention to the SENTRY program's mathematical assessment that, since this asteroid is still less of a risk than the projected background rate of asteroid impacts, this is too improbable for the general public to pay any attention to? I doubt it, since we're really talking silly-season filler news here, not a genuine scare story. Maybe there's just too much bad shit going on already-- it sort of amazed me that the first story broke, as it was.
After all, it popped up on the risks page right after the other story subsided, and it still has the delicious first possible apocalypse date of May 20, 2006, shifted a mere few hours later than first reported. Also, the early impact probability estimate has grown a bit (it's now better than one in a billion), and the size estimate has gotten bigger! Projected yield now is three-quarters of a million megatons, which would pretty definitely be a major gut-punch to civilization.
There are a whole lot of other potential impacts, too, including early ones-- it looks to me like this guy is in some sort of resonant orbit with the Earth, with a period of almost exactly three years, though interesting things happen to the simulation possibilities further down the line as the periodic Earth encounters themselves vary the orbit. When the asteroid's actual behavior gets pinned down (and the collision risk probably eliminated) after a few more days of observations, it will no doubt be pigeonholed in some family of asteroids with a special dynamical relationship with our home.
So why no fuss? Of course, stories equivalent to this one happen several times a year, but this time it's right after another giant-asteroid fad. Could journalists actually be paying attention to the SENTRY program's mathematical assessment that, since this asteroid is still less of a risk than the projected background rate of asteroid impacts, this is too improbable for the general public to pay any attention to? I doubt it, since we're really talking silly-season filler news here, not a genuine scare story. Maybe there's just too much bad shit going on already-- it sort of amazed me that the first story broke, as it was.