Watching killer asteroids; recents finds (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 19, 2015, 14:07 (3597 days ago) @ David Turell

Still a scary problem. At least over 1,500 are nearby, some crossing our orbit, others outside:-http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/19/bigger-problems-than-global-warming-nasa-discovers-8-new-dangerous-near-earth-asteroids/-"YP139 has a “H” value of 21.6, which corresponds to a possible diameter of 130 - 300 metres.-"To put this into perspective, the Chelyabinsk meteor which caused a 500 kiloton explosion over Russia in 2013 was estimated to be around 20 metres in diameter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor A 300 metre object has the potential to cause (300 ^ 3 / 20 ^ 3) * 500 kilotons = 1.6 Gigaton explosion. An explosion of this magnitude, especially an ocean strike, could create gigantic Tsunamis, and would severely disrupt the global climate for several years, possibly longer.-"Its nice to know that NASA occasionally takes a break from climate bothering, long enough to do something space related, but I'm mildly horrified that a project this important appears to be so far down the list of priorities, that the project was mothballed for a year while the survey satellite stood waiting for a refuel. Granted that a major Asteroid strike is a low probability event, but the consequences are potentially catastrophic - a big ocean strike could kill millions, maybe even billions of people.-"As the Chelyabinsk wakeup call demonstrated, the risk of a damaging meteor impact is not a possibility which should be neglected."-From NASA:-http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html