media circus ahoy!
Sep. 9th, 2003 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinMaybe they're too burned by the last round to notice, but the 2009 impact possibility for 2003 QO104 is approaching Palermo Technical Scale zero. (If it tops zero, that will mean that most of the risk of us getting smashed by an asteroid from now through 2009 comes from that one asteroid. In other words, it's no particular cause for panic; you should only be about twice as scared of this as you normally are, which I hope isn't much. But it might cause another turn of the public-relations crank that we just saw exercised. I wonder what it will take to get to Torino scale 2.)
These "resonant return" cases are hard to calculate because each Earth encounter modifies the orbit, so the uncertainties compound rapidly. In this case the thing swings by every three years. Apparently it went past in late May and nobody noticed at the time.
As far as I know, two objects have had positive Palermo ratings. One, which is no longer a risk, caused a particularly stupid controversy when the some media outlets in Britain failed to make the level of probability clear. The other is a bizarre case, an asteroid observed back in 1950 that was recently re-observed; the long time baseline allows a calculation of a small impact risk in the year 2880. In no other case of a potentially hazardous near-Earth object is there enough data to calculate that far ahead.
These risk scales haven't been around for very long, and it will be interesting to see if we get about one of these a year.
Update: This diagram shows quantitatively where the Torino PR-scale numbers come from. This particular bugger's pretty big, well into the global-devastation zone, so the reported Torino number ought to hit 2 if the impact probability gets somewhere above about 10^-5, or 0.001 percent.
These "resonant return" cases are hard to calculate because each Earth encounter modifies the orbit, so the uncertainties compound rapidly. In this case the thing swings by every three years. Apparently it went past in late May and nobody noticed at the time.
As far as I know, two objects have had positive Palermo ratings. One, which is no longer a risk, caused a particularly stupid controversy when the some media outlets in Britain failed to make the level of probability clear. The other is a bizarre case, an asteroid observed back in 1950 that was recently re-observed; the long time baseline allows a calculation of a small impact risk in the year 2880. In no other case of a potentially hazardous near-Earth object is there enough data to calculate that far ahead.
These risk scales haven't been around for very long, and it will be interesting to see if we get about one of these a year.
Update: This diagram shows quantitatively where the Torino PR-scale numbers come from. This particular bugger's pretty big, well into the global-devastation zone, so the reported Torino number ought to hit 2 if the impact probability gets somewhere above about 10^-5, or 0.001 percent.
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off-topic
Date: 2003-09-09 10:30 pm (UTC)Re: off-topic
Date: 2003-09-09 10:45 pm (UTC)