Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth (cnn.com) 237
Frosty Piss writes from a report via CNN: A small asteroid has been found circling Earth. Scientists say it looks like the asteroid, named 2016 HO3, has been out there for about 50 years. Calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. Scientists think the asteroid is between 120 and 300 feet (37 to 91 meters) in diameter, and NASA says it never gets closer than 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) from Earth. It was found on April 27, 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years? Probably the same way we've missed all the flying saucers!
To put it into perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
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It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.
Re:To put it into perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Never is such a long time.
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You have a limited imagination. Soon or later humans are going to have to leave this planet or face extinction. At some point moon bases will exist, land there will have value as the uber rich make their claims, resources will be needed. Metals and minerals are surrounding us, those on Earth are being wasted and will become rarer. Fast forward a million years... You can do the rest.
Perhaps you're mistaking this site for reddit or the daily mail, where attention spans are measured in atto-seconds, and the fu
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you're funny, in a million years we could be unintelligent apelike creatures
we've barely scratched the 25 mile crust surface of this earth of resources, we're really not running out of anything. not even helium despite the alarmist nonsense (most helium is just vented from nat gas wells, wasted)
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Why? Even if Earth was hit by an asteroid it would be a better place to live than anywhere else.
Re:To put it into perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Jeez, what a surefire way to be wrong you've chosen. Others already commented on the infinite time frame you've chosen but I'd like to add that "cost effective" is pretty relative.
There just needs to be a shortage of material found on an asteroid that is either life threatening or lowers our quality of life enough for people to decide they're going to try it.
And why should this never be cost effective? Robotic mining equipment needs to be deployed once. And without much gravity to speak off, all you need to do is launch the mined material in the direction of a desert every few days.
Can't be that hard to accomplish.
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It's probably a little harder than that. First of all you don't just launch stuff in the direction of a desert, you launch them retrograde to the asteroid's orbit so it gets into an orbit with a perigee close to earth. Then you have to keep it from burning up in the atmosphere, which means you'll have to enclose it in some sort of vessel that can survive reentry (unless you send a really huge chunk and accept the fact that much of it will burn up in the atmosphere and you'll have to dig up the rest from the
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Or, you could... you know... just build stuff IN ORBIT where raw materials cost 87 thousand times what it would cost on the surface.
Moving and parking that thing would be a bitch, but it's value as raw materials to make things in space would be immense.
Especially true if it's made of metals. You could do all kinds of things, make reaction mass for out of Earth orbit craft, make beams and struts to put together a station, use it for soil, counterweights, etc.
If it's not metal, you could get gasses or pos
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Don't forget water; it will be the most valuable space resource for the foreseeable future. You can use it as propellant, you can make rocket fuel out of it, it's necessary for most chemical processes you may wish to setup, you need it to live (if you are sending people), you can use it as a radiation shield, ... it's a pretty amazing resource.
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Robotic mining equipment only needs to be launched once (presuming it never needs maintenance of any kind) - but the fuel needed to deorbit the mined material is another matter entirely.
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Sorry, no. You don't need fuel (or much of it anyway) to deorbit anything.
To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere. There's various ways you can handle that without your valuable ores (or better yet, fully processed ores) simply vaporizing: you can build some
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you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well
If only there were some source of extraneous mass on a mined asteroid that could be thrown off to produce thrust.
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Yes, you can use a mass driver. But that requires some kind of energy source too; mass doesn't get thrown off an asteroid for free. But do you even need to bother? This isn't human cargo, so time isn't quite so important. You can probably just use an ion engine to push the thing into a trajectory that it'll fall to the Earth with aerobraking. Though more likely, it'd probably make more sense to try to refine the ores in space first, so we're not just dropping giant asteroids on Earth; smaller (and more
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nonsense, it can take an immense amount of fuel to de-orbit something, depends on mass and delta vee needed. For example, let's consider de-orbiting around the sun. it takes more energy to reach the orbit of mercury from an orbit at earth's distance, than to leave the solar system entirely, let alone to send anything into the Sun. If an asteroid needs a huge delta vee change to be captured by earth, large amounts of fuel will be needed.
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You have no idea what you're talking about. The Apollo missions did not need "an immense amount of fuel" to return astronauts to the Earth. That's just stupid.
Have you entirely forgotten that the Earth has an atmosphere?
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Good luck aerobraking the quantities of materials needed for space mining to be viable. Apollo capsules are small and light compared to even a single truck full of ore. Apollo was only coming back from the Moon, asteroids are much further out and would require much more delta V to reach the Earth's atmosphere. They would then be coming in much faster, whilst carrying more mass.
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To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it.
It takes more energy to deorbit something than to escape it entirely, because orbital velocity is already 1/sqrt(2) of escape velocity. Getting to the sun requires a velocity more than three times as high as it takes to get out of the solar system entirely, which basically means about 10X as much fuel. (The fuel itself is heavy, so it's higher than that.)
Laughably wrong, that's not it works. (Score:2)
Um, no. That's not how it works. You need sufficient fuel to change it's perapsis so that it's inside the atmosphere - and that can be a great deal of fuel indeed. (Nothing just 'falls' into the atmosphere.) Not to mention, if you're not already in Earth's gravity well (I.E. in Earth orbit), you'll need a great deal *more* fuel to ren
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Rocks being returned to earth are most certainly going to be guided in some manner. But as for fuel, the Apollo capsule did not have a lot of fuel on board. Somehow they managed to get back to Earth intact.
This reply was even stupider than your first. (Score:2)
Which means guidance and control packages will have to be regularly shipped up. It won't be as simple as you mistakenly assumed.
The Apollo capsule may not have, but the Apollo Service Module certainly did.
Seriously, are you so monumentally stupid you don't even know how Apollo worked?
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: It's never going to be cost effective."
asteroid mining is not forminerals for Earth. Its for use in space construction or on the Moon.
It costs way more in energy,fuel or propellant to lift something out of Earths gravity well and thick atmosphere than it does to move it from the asteroid belt of even Kuiper Belt to geostat orbit or L5
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You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to find asteroids to mine; they're buzzing right by the Earth all the time. If you can find asteroids with valuable-enough ores (such as gold, platinum, rhodium, etc.) then it could very well be worth it to launch robotic (or at least remote-control, these distances aren't that far) missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.
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It would take a lot of energy to rdz with an asteroid then drag the materials back to Earth.
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It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.
But there will certainly be experimentation, and depending on what this asteroid is made of, it could probably be a good candidate for testing.
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Well, when I was young papers claimed that plenty of asteroids are pure metals with a cover of dust (like the iridium asteroid killing the dinosaurs ... well, the one that made the Yucatan bay).
If that is in fact true (never dug into it) then it might be very easily cost effective.
On the other hand, the question is anyway what you want to make with it. If we indeed would want to build a space habitat for a few 1000 people, such an asteroid, relatively close to earth and even simpler to mine than moon, would
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How much is the gold worth if the global supply is doubled and it looks like there will be more to come? Plus I'm pretty sure the odds of finding an asteroid that high in gold content is astronomically high (pun intended).
How much is the gold worth if you don't have enough and want more?
Really, asteroid mining is a question of energy availability versus materials availability. If energy becomes sufficiently available and can be stored in a useful manner, using it to obtain materials we want makes the idea viable. Of course, that's not next week, or the week after.
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The fantasy is returning space mined minerals to Earth. If you consider the costs to get some of those materials into space, the asteroid mining makes more sense.
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Gold dental fillings last 3x longer than the next best; It's really all any of us should be using but cost/rarity has made discouraged usage.
Citation needed. This sounds like a bunch of crap. There's lots of people walking around with amalgam fillings that are decades old (the mercury issues is another issue, you just talked about "lasting"), and the newer resin fillings seem to last a long time too: I have some that are at least 15 years old now and show no signs of trouble. If I can get, say, 30 years
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> why would I care about one lasting 90 years? Unless these life-extension therapies come through, it's not like I'm going to be around long enough for that to matter
The solution for that will be growing new teeth using stem cells.
http://now.tufts.edu/articles/... [tufts.edu]
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Yes. Probably because most of it sank into the core while Earth's surface was still liquid.
Maybe we should compare the costs of looking for gold there vs. looking for asteroids containing gold?
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It will make more sense to de-orbit, then mine, something this small.
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I completely disagree. If you can find an asteroid nearby with a few trillion dollars' worth of gold and platinum, it can very well be economical to bring that back to earth. A few million $ worth of iron, not so much.
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It's a good candidate for an 'asteroid redirect' mission in any case, but the mining potential depends on what it's made of. Chances are it made of something that would be useful up there. I would bet that Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are interested in this rock. It would give them a chance to prove out the basic technology they'll need in the long term, and which we'll all need for planetary protection.
It's already in a pretty handy orbit, but I'd like to see them send a 'gravity tug' to c
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What? The goddam thing flies in an OVAL?!?
Take coverrrrrrrr!
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false. though ellipses are are the most common, some are circular (circles are not ovals) some are hyperbolas and parabolas
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I assume you've never played Kerbal Space Program.
Why would you want to get into a solar orbit? Your goal is to get close to the asteroid with zero relative velocity, in other words you need to get into exactly the same orbit around the earth. I fail to see how exiting the earth's gravity well and then coming back again would somehow make that easier to achieve.
The easiest way to get there is probably by first getting into low earth orbit, then accelerating into a slingshot maneuver around the moon that rai
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This asteroid is *not* in orbit around the earth. It is a quasisatellite, like Cruithne, in a true orbit around the sun ... but in such an orbit that its distance from Earth never exceeds 19 million miles.
To reach a quasisatellite, you *will* need to leave true Earth orbit and obtain a solar orbit. Your transfer orbit will then intersect the quasisatellite's orbit, and when you get close, you will match orbits so you can land.
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And incidentally, KSP cannot model quasisatellites, because the orbit is not just an ellipse -- it's an ellipse that shifts, due to gravitational effects from Earth and other bodies, after a given (large) number of orbits. KSP only uses true ellipses for planets and moons, and patched conics for ships and (maybe) asteroids. It doesn't use real 3-body mechanics at all.
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50 years, century... (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
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Wonderful H2G2 quote! :-)
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Yep, passed over Jodrell bank without a blip, which was a pity as it was exactly the sort of thing they had been looking for.
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Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.
"orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.
However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.
Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either.
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Actually the sun is quite close in terms of the solar system. It's closer than Mars and Venus sometimes -- in fact the sun can be closer than any planet at times. It's also more than 3x closer than Jupiter's closest approach, and we've sent plenty of probes to Jupiter. Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.
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Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.
Well, why can't they schedule the landing for nighttime when it doesn't shine?
(OK, old joke, I'll quit now.)
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The other problem is that it takes more energy to send a probe to the Sun than to Pluto. Obviously that's not insurmountable: we have, after all, sent probes to Mercury. But the point is that distance isn't the only thing that matters.
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See this [wikipedia.org] for a good explanation.
Delta-v from low earth orbit to the sun requires shedding 24km/s. Delta-v from earth orbit to pluto only requires 8.4km/s.
Actually you can get to the sun with far less -- something like 8.8km/s -- but it would take fantastically longer. In effect you would escape the entire solar system first, then kill your angular momentum completely.
Or you could take advantage of moon or other planet flybys, again reducing the energy required by trading it for massive amounts of time.
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it takes more energy to reach the orbit of mercury from orbit at earth's distance than to leave solar system, let alone send something into sun
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Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Hint: that's why it's called "space".
Re: So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has b (Score:2)
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We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
We should have been listening for it after all space is the final front ear :D
Flight MH370 (Score:2)
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Even when we are looking for a particular object and even one that we made ourselves and is on the planet we seem to have incredible difficulty finding it. Just look at flight MH370 where we still don't really know what happened to it or where it went down despite a huge international effort and the size of that is very comparable at 73.9m in length.
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I would have up-moderated, but some of the computations seem off...
Sphere area is pi * r^2 (*).
So, for 80m diameter, radius is 40m, that would be pi * 1.6 * 10^3 m^2. Cross sectional area with a sphere differ, but for a 14 * 10^6 km radius sphere, curvature is small enough to ignore.
Sphere with a radius of 14 * 10^9 m has a surface area of pi * 1.96 * 10^20 m^2.
Solid angle formed by the asteroid is (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (14 * 10^9)^2 = (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (1.96 * 10^20) = pi * 8.2 * 10^-18 = 2.6 * 10^-17 sr
Nu
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sphere area is 4 pi r^2.
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sphere area is 4 pi r^2
Oops, right, I even had it in front of my nose when checking for steradians. I always mess up some mundane detail.
With that in mind, this gives:
Asteroid cross-section: pi * 1.6 * 10^3 m^2
Sphere surface: pi * 7.84 * 10^20 m^2
Solid angle: 2.6 * 10^-17 sr
Number of such asteroids that could fit onto the sphere: 4.9 * 10^17
Compared to the land surface of the USA: 18,7 mm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 4.9 mm.
Compared to the surface of the earth: 10,4 cm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 3.6 cm.
Don't breathe a sigh of relief (Score:2)
It's just biding it's time.
Better deep freeze Robert Duvall to have him take care of it later.
You might refer to it as as asteroid... (Score:5, Funny)
We prefer the term "Mother Ship"/
Wait... (Score:2)
...that's no moon!
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Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (Score:2)
Just one of Santa's early jet-propelled sleighs to cope with population growth (you think flying reindeer were always going to keep up? get real)
Unfortunately this one reached near escape velocity. The test elves bailed out in time.
So nothing to see here. Pay no attention to 2016 HO HO HO
Jules Verne called it (Score:2)
3e-09 radians, 5e-19 stradians. in just 50 years?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the question is not "how come we missed it for 50 years?". The question is "how come we found it in just 50 years! OMG our astronomers are awesome!".
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Fucking CNN (Score:5, Informative)
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You are correct in that the recent trendy definition of "planet" that excludes Pluto is stupid because it also excludes the Earth
The vote was hastily done after the real astronomers went home, you know.
Eleanor Cameron called it..... (Score:2)
See "Mr. Bass's Planetoid", the 2nd or 3rd book in her children's book series about the mushroom people. I remember reading it as a kid, but can't recall too many details.
That's no moon! (Score:2)
First Contact (Score:2)
Ah, those first atomic explosions got someone's attention.
After due consideration, they've stayed the F away out there, since.
Name It! (Score:2)
Lottery? Or let the astronomers do it?
I suggest "Invisus."
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Like where, besides Seattle and truly rural places like remote parts of Montana?
I live in a fairly rural county in Virginia and I have high-speed cable internet. It works great. (I think it's 20MB/s; I'm not sure, it's not their fastest grade available here, but one tier down I think, more than fast enough for Netflix, probably for 2 or 3 Netflix streams really.)
Extremely rural places are usually stuck on dialup because they're too far out for cable companies to bother with; people there use either dial-u
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Are you sure you guys are living in a first world country?
A city with a population density comparable to most and you can't get more than ISDN or modems? Hell, the world moved on while you lot were faffing about in the technological dark ages.
Honestly, even 128kbps on the modern web? That's just laughable. I can't even begin to fathom. I haven't used speeds like that for nearly 20 years. And at the time we were wondering what this DSL thing was that the Americans were always going on about and envious.
Re:because ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's fucking tiny.
Let's put some numbers on this. The average grain of coarse sand is 2mm in diameter, so a grain of coarse sand a kilometre away occupies an arc of 115 millionths of a degree. A 37m rock 14 million km away occupies an arc 151 millionths of a degree, very much the same ballpark.
So spotting this thing would be like trying to see a cold, dark grain of sand from a kilometre away, at night. Good luck with that.
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50 years...75 years...nearly 100 years. What's the difference? Either way, at least now I suspect we know where APK came from.
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Hahahaha, I immediately had the same exact internal conflict with this, lmao!
Re:because ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the algorithms governing orbital progression are very well known. You watch the thing for a while , fit its path to the function, and run time in reverse (JUST IN THE SIMULATION) to see where it came from.
Heck, it's been decades since amateur astronomers did this with Soviet satellites and discovered the launch sites before the CIA did.
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run time in reverse (JUST IN THE SIMULATION)
Thanks for that clarification. Wouldn't want to get a ticket for a causality violation or anything...
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I don't get the same results (*) :
Arc formed by a grain of coarse sand one kilometre away:
(2 mm / (2 * pi * 10^6 mm )) * (360 / (2 * pi)) = 180 * 10^-6 / pi^2 = 18 * 10^-6
Arc formed by an asteroid of 37m 14 million km away:
(37 m / (2 * pi * 14 * 10^9 m )) * (360 / (2 * pi)) = 238 * 10^-9 / pi^2 = 24 * 10^-9
So, that would be 750 times smaller that a grain of sand a kilometre away.
(*) But I've been wrong in the current discussion already [slashdot.org], so don't believe me and double-check ;)
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2mm grain of sand 1 km away
atan( 0.002/1000) = 1.14e-4 degrees
37m asteroid 14e6 Km away
atan(37/14e9) = 1.51e-7 degrees
The asteroid appears 750 times smaller then a grain of sand at those distances. A grain of sand 750 km away would be a much closer comparison.
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In the famous Hubble deep field image shown at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] the smallest galaxies are approximatively at 10 billion = 1E10 light years. Assuming that they have a typical size of 100000=1e5 light years (as our own galaxy) that gives us the ratio 1e5/1e10 = 1e-5
The asteroid is 100m = 1e2 meters wide at a distance of 14 millions km = 14 billions meters= 14e9 meters which give a ratio of 1e2 / 14e9 = 7.14e-09
So on the Hubble deep field image, the asteroid would be about 1400 times smal
Re:because ... (Score:4, Funny)
And it's fucking tiny.
Let's put some numbers on this. The average grain of coarse sand is 2mm in diameter, so a grain of coarse sand a kilometre away occupies an arc of 115 millionths of a degree. A 37m rock 14 million km away occupies an arc 151 millionths of a degree, very much the same ballpark.
So spotting this thing would be like trying to see a cold, dark grain of sand from a kilometre away, at night. Good luck with that.
All you need is a good torch, sorry flashlight, and a telescope. Hardly rocket science.
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And it's motion is transverse so it's not coming towards you. It's a foot ball field 14 million Km away. That's ( roughly) 1,076 complete laps around the equator away.
You won't see this without assistance.
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At what point does it make less sense to say that the asteroid is orbiting the Earth, and more sense to say that both are orbiting the sun near each other with the same orbital period?
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Yep- further away than the moon and very very small.
Still, would make a nice hideout.
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It is the alien base station.
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-see http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/... [oed.com]