Maybe I did not read close enough but how is it "first"?
Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile — funded by the National Science Foundation — will catalog the solar system from the ground...
"It took us 200 years to discover all the asteroids we know to date, about 1.2 million asteroids," Mario Jurić, the Rubin Observatory's solar system discovery team lead and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Astronomy. "In the first three to six months of Rubin, we will double that."
That's one additional ground based observatory coming online in the Southern hemisphere. If we get our act together and build a lot more of these and other space based observatories we're going to see the true scope of the "shooting gallery". We really need to raise public awareness of this, as a planet based civilization we are taking our chances by ignoring the problem and assuming everything will be fine for a hundred or a thousand more years. All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe will be for naught if we get smoked by a rock big enough to fill the atmosphere with particulate matter and drop global temperatures for years afterward let alone anything bigger resulting in global firestorms and tsunamis.
And prevention wouldn’t require Bruce Willis to blow it up with nukes, like the DART mission all you’d need is to hit the space rock with a fast moving, small probe and alter its course by a millionth of a degree far enough out, could be the difference between hitting a city, landing in the ocean, or not hitting earth at all.
But the problem of late discovery are the ones that are (far?) bigger than this ones, the ones that manage to reach the ground in sizes much bigger than a pebble. Are we detecting all the dangerous ones (and little less dangerous but big enough), and with enough anticipation? Had been in recent times surprises of big enough asteroids passing close enough?
I suppose that in the end, we are playing with odds. It didn't happened for long enough, most that get close is harmless, and I suppose that if there are some harder to be detected (i.e. darker/low reflective ones?) they should not be the majority. But from time to time we have events that reminds us the bet we are playing.
I'm quite sure it wouldn't work but was an interesting idea.
It's pretty common to reference a nearby place name that is well known/recognized versus a place name that might be more accurate but leaves most receivers/readers/etc thinking "...where?"
Of those 1.2 million orbits, how many are dangerous?
The best I can guess is that 8 of these have been detected before they hit, but only this one was detected 3 hours before it did. The rest must have been detected with longer or shorter times before impact (presumably longer).
Alternatively, perhaps it is unique because of its small size, at only 1 meter.
I thought we knew that despite modern criticism that duck and cover was effective for those outside of some range given a nuclear explosion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_cover#Efficacy_during...
I also think that those exercises haven't been done in schools for quite some time. I never did them despite plenty of fire and severe weather drills.
If it helps you sleep at night, over the billions of years earth has been in its current orbit, it’s already ‘eaten’ all the high risk asteroids.
What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards.
Which do exist.
But the earths crust was molten in it’s early life due in some large part due to persistent and high volume infalling asteroids, and that time is long gone.
If something happens over your house, is it "over Washington"?
Im not trying to debate, just surprised that is even considered an option.
Observing near earth objects (NEOs) requires shorter exposure times because their (apparent) motion is quite fast, and that has an impact on how faint the objects you can detect can be.
There are methods like synthetic tracking though, that can detect fainter objects (even those hidden in the noise, not visible by eye).
Well, at least not in one piece. Pieces of the previous one over France (which happened to be detected by the same person before it entered the atmosphere), have been found: https://karmaka.de/?p=32369
You probably wouldn't want to nuke it, because you risk buck shotting the earth with a cloud of asteroids. Having a vectored nuclear rocket also allows you to change your trajectory if your initial calculations are off.
>What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards.
How do you know this?
It's positive that they all happened in the last 16 years and the frequency seems to be increasing. The Rubin Observatory using AI to search will drastically increase the number. That might be enough to raise public awareness sufficiently to create a defense. Asteroid detection and defense along with studying solar events should be a higher priority than our current boogie men.
And it’s a simple bit of math.
Asteroid collisions with our planet (or any other planet) destroys the asteroid.
unless something is making ‘new events’ (creating new asteroids, which we know of little/no mechanism for), we’re currently left only with asteroids which have managed to avoid impacting us or another planet for the billions of years before now they’ve been floating around the solar system.
Over x billions of years, the 1 in 1000 events have all played out. The 1 in 1000000 events have all played out, etc, etc.
So we’re just left with the lowest odds events, aka the ones with the lowest probability/lowest risk of occurring. The long-long-long tail.
It doesn’t mean we won’t get whacked by a shoemaker/levy impact in the future, just that the odds of it occurring now are very very low compared to say several billion years ago when there were far more objects floating around that hadn’t terminated their orbits into something already.
Of course, we also have a lot more incentive now to prevent such an occurrence (as we have stuff we don’t want to have destroyed now) as compared to several billion years ago when we didn’t exist.
So worth investing into. But we’re not looking for common/predictable situations, we’re looking for very unusual occurrences and hoping for enough forewarning to make it easy to deal with the consequences.
If this was a matter of dealing with high probability events, we’d have a very different approach.