On February 15th, the people of planet Earth will receive a wake-up call from our Solar System. Asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered just 1 year ago, will narrowly miss hitting the Earth by only 17 thousand miles. That is about the distance the Earth travels in just 15 minutes, so this truly is a close shave. In fact, 2012 DA14 will pass underneath our communications satellites as it flies by Earth!
Image: NASA
This particular asteroid is not large, only about 160 feet across or roughly the size of an office building, and is not going to hit us on February 15th anyhow. But consider that just 105 years ago, an asteroid slightly smaller than this struck Earth in Siberia near Tunguska, and completely flattened a forested area of 1000 square miles, which is larger than metropolitan New York City or Washington DC!
1000 square miles of trees blown over like matchsticks!
The area of destruction at Tunguska compared to some large cities (from http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/guide22.html )
2012 DA14 is what is known as a Near Earth Asteroid because its orbit crosses Earth’s orbit, and it may therefore someday run into Earth. Of the million asteroids as large as or larger than 2012 DA14, we have only tracked less than 10,000. So the fact that we knew ahead of time that 2012 DA14 is about to buzz by Earth is really only a matter of luck. Ninety nine percent of the time we are oblivious, simply because we have not mapped and tracked 99 percent of Near Earth Asteroids.
Now consider the fact that we can actually deflect an asteroid from hitting Earth (which by the way is enormously easier than capturing an asteroid or for that matter mining one), and it seems crazy that we haven’t yet mapped these million asteroids that threaten Earth.
Shouldn’t we know in advance of the next asteroid impact, and actually prevent it?
Click here for our FAQ on 2012 DA14
Click here to learn more about our work.
I am amazed how you can work all this out.You should have competition for someone to go into space all money could go to charity.$30 dollars a ticket
About 6 weeks ago another object came closer than the moon and when it passed by they spotted a smaller companion object that they had no idea about. I applaud the mission of the 612 foundation to spot more objects, but there are two other legs of the protection triad that also need support:
1) we need to use computers to follow these objects and find out when they are influenced by other objects, and when they may collide with each other,
and
2) we need to develop strategies for preventing any upcoming collisions, AND TEST THESE STRATEGIES AHEAD OF TIME.
I’d like to participate on the computing part if 612 foundation could set up a community for that.
Thank goodness you guys are doing this. I would hope that NASA will some day put more effort and funding support in projects like this, which are more important than most want to admit. Keep up the great work! Let’s hope that a deflection method is not needed for a long while, but we all know that one will hit us… it’s a given. Thanks again… Mike from SATWATCH.ORG
Thank you Mike. We appreciate your kind words of support.
We’ll be providing live online coverage free to the public of 2012 DA14′s pass on Friday. Details are here: http://plus.google.com/u/0/108176209664415419112/posts/TqoA426EhKB
I’ll be using two of the slooh.com robotic telescopes to track the asteroid throughout the night. We’ll also have another telescope feed joining us from Arizona on one of the later shows. Bob Berman of Astronomy magazine will be guesting on the shows.
Because of its relative proximity to Earth, we’ll have to track it as a satellite rather than an asteroid – this is because its apparent rate of motion changes from second-to-second. This means the telescope mount has to constantly change its slewing speed.
Thank you Paul. We will share with our community!
Very excited about the well-documented event in Russia. And the sound, even in car-mounted video was frightening. Perhaps folks will finally take a little notice that the potential dangers are real.