WARNING: Space Rock!

[tim elliott]

Well, by then I'll be 83, so that may be a cool way to go anyway...better
than
getting Alzheimer's and dying have forgotten everything & everyone I
loved...
tim  8>)...


On 12/7/06, M Holmes <fofp at holyrood.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> www.spaceguarduk.com/news.htm
>
> Short form:
>
> An Earthbuster sized rock called "Apophis" (how Stargate is *that*?)
> will squeak by the Earth on Friday 13th April 2029 at a distance of
> 20,000 miles.  It sounds a lot but it's lower than TV sats and in
> astronomical terms that's like being missed by a truck that leaves paint
> flecks on your nose.  It'll even be naked-eye visible as it passes - an
> extremely rare event in itself.
>
> As it turns out though, we don't get to whistle and return to regular
> programming.  Seems that there's a spot about twice the size of Apophis
> in the Earth locale, and if Apophis threads the cosmic needle by passing
> through it, and gets affected just so by the Earth-Moon gravity then
> exactly seven years later, it'll be back to ruin our whole day.
>
> What's interesting is that we don't know whether it will hit that spot,
> and it'd take a great deal more calculation to narrow down where it will
> go, though due to sundry small effects, it will be hard to be sure.
> Luckily it'd be a lot easier to make it miss that spot than to make it
> miss the Earth - a small "gravity tractor" would suffice.  The trouble
> is that unless we get better info on its trajectory, we might as easily
> be moving it onto the target as off it. Ironically it'd cost about a
> quarter of a billion to get a transponder and gravity tractor out there,
> and that's just about what it cost to make the movie "Armageddon".
>
> On the face of it though, we're more likely to make "Armageddon II" than
> we are to get some machinery out there to perhaps achieve the real
> thing.
>
> FoFP
>
> P.S: If you want the date of the Biblical Flood, the
>



-- 
tim  8>)...
http://heathcliff13.blogspot.com