evolution

“Huge asteroid hurtles toward Earth” (UPI/PJM).

Jun. 29, 2006 (UPI delivered by Newstex) — An asteroid that’s about one-half-mile wide is hurtling toward Earth, expected to narrowly miss the planet early Monday.
Astronomers say the space rock, called 2004 XP14, will pass “exceptionally close” to Earth in astronomical terms — 268,624 miles away at its closest approach, The Scotsman reported. That’s a little more than the moon’s average distance from Earth.

If you have Java, you can see this disturbing animation (click on “Orbit Viewer”) that predicts the asteroid’s orbit in relation to Earth’s. I let the time index run through the year 2006, and found that the asteroid’s maximum distance from Earth is 1.008 AU (astronomical units; 1 AU = 149,597,870.691 km = 92,955,807.267 mi), and its minimum distance — which will occur on 07.03 — is 0.0029 AU, or roughly 270,000 miles, which is only slightly greater than the Moon’s distance from Earth.

NASA doesn’t believe the object is a threat. It’d be interesting to sit down and figure out by how much they’d have to be wrong to fail to predict a collision.

If it did produce a collision, you wouldn’t want to be standing near it. If it struck the KU Campanile, it would make a crater the size of the entire city of Lawrence, and release energy equivalent to 28,000 megatons of TNT; or roughly three times the combined stored energy of all the world’s nuclear weapons. Douglas (Lawrence, Eudora, Baldwin City), Shawnee (Topeka), Leavenworth (Tonganoxie), and Jefferson (McClouth, Oskaloosa) Counties would be utterly annihilated. Kansas City would make New Orleans after Katrina look like Paradise. Those as far away as Manhattan, Emporia, and Blue Springs would get away with only severe third-degree burns and widespread property destruction. People in Salina, Chanute, and Columbia, MO would get away with a mild sunburn — from a fireball eight miles in diameter.

Oh, and people as far away as West Lafayette, IN — my former home, 660 miles from Lawrence — will experience the gentle faraway rolling of a magnitude-7.6 earthquake.

The good news is that most of the rest of the world won’t be affected that much. The Earth will not shed very much mass, and its orbit shouldn’t be affected. Nice to know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 22:24 and is filed under science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.