Avoiding A “Crash Course” In Planetary Defense

[Ivan Seeking]

GARDEN GROVE, California – There is certainty in the thought that an asteroid or comet loitering in deep space has Earth’s name on it. While a civilization-snuffing impact is a low probability, it is not zero.

But there are other trouble-makers out there too. They are the smaller asteroids, and far more numerous. They too could mess up the day, but in a more localized way.

The technologies and techniques to defend Earth from such malicious cosmic interlopers were tackled at The Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids held here February 23-26, and sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

How best to deflect or defeat nature’s own terrorist attack on our own planetary turf conjures up all kinds of thinking -- from nudging to nuking objects that have Earth in their cross-hairs. [continued]

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/neo_defense_040310.html

[meteor]

Let's expect that they have done the correct calculations in this case
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994793



"The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service



Closest asteroid to pass Earth approaches


12:27 18 March 04

NewScientist.com news service

An asteroid the size of a small office building will make the closest approach ever recorded to the Earth on Thursday evening

Discovered just two days ago by an automated telescope scanning the sky for near-Earth objects, asteroid 2004 FH will miss the planet by a mere 40,000 kilometres, just over a tenth of the distance to the Moon.

The previous record was set 27 September 2003, when 10-metre asteroid 2003 SQ222 missed the earth by about twice that distance. However, that object came from inside the Earth's orbit, so its close approach was not recorded until it had passed the Earth."





Shivers

[selfAdjoint]

12:27 18 March 04

AM or PM? I presume Greenwich? In which case its way past as I post.

[Nereid]

Heading away now (http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1218_1.asp), but since it's an Aten (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Atens.html)*, it will surely be back someday, maybe in the lifetime of many PF members [;)]

*"Atens have semimajor axes less than 1.0 AU, Apollos have perihelion distances less than 1.0 AU and Amors have perihelion distances less than 1.3 AU. Centaur objects have perihelia beyond the orbit of Jupiter and semimajor axes inside the orbit of Neptune. Transneptunian objects have orbits with semimajor axes beyond the orbit of Neptune--some of these objects, generally assumed to be in librations with Neptune, have perihelion distances inside the orbit of Neptune."