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Yekaterina Pustynnikova / AP
In this photo provided by Chelyabinsk.ru, a meteor contrail is seen over Chelyabinsk on Friday, Feb. 15, 2013.
There aren't yet any advance warning systems that could give Earthlings a heads-up before an untracked space rock hits. But a telescope project in Hawaii aims to change that, and potentially provide a chance for those in threatened areas to evacuate. A meteor alert might have made a difference to Russia's Chelyabinsk region on Friday.
Read: Nuclear-like in its intensity, Russia meteor blast is largest since 1908
"There are excellent ongoing surveys for asteroids that are capable of seeing such a rock with one to two days' warning, but they do not cover the whole sky each night, so there's a good chance that any given rock can slip by them for days to weeks. This one obviously did," astronomer John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii told NBC News Friday.
Tonry is one of the key players in a NASA-backed effort to build ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), two observatories in Hawaii that can simultaneously scan the entire visible sky twice a night.
"If ATLAS were up and running we might very well have seen" the meteor that hit Russia, he said, and "could have provided one to two days' warning."
However, he adds, the success of detection "depends on a couple of assumptions." One is that it's not cloudy. Another is that the asteroid doesn't go over the South Pole, "where ATLAS cannot see."
Telescopes, Tony said, "can only see the sky above the horizon, obviously. A telescope that's sited in the northern hemisphere (which ATLAS will be) cannot see all the way to the South Pole of the sky." And, "if the asteroid were coming from that direction, there's a good chance that it would never rise above the horizon for a northern telescope before it hits."
While it would "easy to build multiple copies of ATLAS and put some in the south, and spread them out so they see different weather patterns ... that's for the future," he said.
Dozens were hospitalized and nearly 1,000 residents suffered minor injuries from fallen debris and the impact of the meteor's powerful landing. NBC's Tom Costello reports.
The ATLAS telescopes are "just now" being built, Tonry said; ATLAS should "start running around the end of 2014 and be fully operational by the end of 2015." NASA has provided $5 million in funding for ATLAS.
At one time, NASA considered launching an asteroid-hunting probe, but that didn't go forward because of the cost, estimated at $500 million almost a decade ago.
Other private efforts are in the works, too.
Last year, leaders of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, including Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, started a campaign to fund and launch a space telescope that will hunt for potential killer asteroids over the course of five and a half years.
Another venture, from a group called Planetary Resources, ultimately wants to do asteroid mining, but says its first step is to "launch an orbital fleet of 'personal space telescopes' capable of looking out into the heavens or back down on Earth," wrote Alan Boyle, NBC News.com's Science editor last year.
More about cosmic hits (and near misses):
- Streaking meteor explodes in Russian sky, injuring nearly 1,000
- Asteroid's close shave ranks among Earth's biggest hits (and misses)
- Meteorite from California fireball reveals its secrets
Suzanne Choney is a contributing writer for NBC News.com. You can follow her on Twitter.
NASA looks at the flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 from several amateur observatories across Australia.
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Wow... I just happened on this thread a few minutes ago. WHO are you people? Weird... No common sense or logic at all...
Its like reading a blog of junior high school students...
Sorry to offend some... others? Really stupid comments...
nah - grade school drop outs it seems - a FEW of us are educated enough to poke fun at the idiots (not that they realize it, of course)
Albert Einstein once said "if you can't explain something simply, then you do not understand the problem". So I will tell you in short simple language what has happened and then you can begin to understand the forces in the Universe.
Mass and it's gravity will exchange energy through magnet force fields until the system balances it's self by continually seeking a balance of equilibrium of charges. A mass that has it's own gravity field and which moves at a speed greater than a mass it's approaching will share gravity fields until like charges repel each other and like gravity forces the two masses apart. The matrix of charge exchanges may cause riffs of electrical charges or "ball Lighting".
Now! Go back to your "monkey wars"! lol
man, and I thought crap just crashed up into other crap. Does this mean that when I drop my hammer onto my toe, it really isn't hitting my toe because its being repelled as it gets next to earth? Oh great, and I have been yelling for nothing. I have to go toss my monkey another nanner.
You igby - that comment isn't even worthy of consideration in a FIFTH GRADE SCIENCE CLASS. It's obvious that YOU aren't smarter than a fifth grader...
How many people have been wiped out by a meteor lately? Ok, when fear central issues a warning that there could be a meteor crashing at 33000 mph somewhere around ... the east coast..... ok... then what? Everyone stay away from windows? Ok, now everyone on the entire east coast is standing around outside.... wait, thats no good... gotta get away from the windows... so everyone on the east coast is heading out to the country to stand around in the woods or trampling a farm field.... Or you could put on your cycling helmet thing and not look up, or how about going to the basement.... ya. And then the dang thing ends up crashing in Kentucky somewhere. Oh wait... the star wars freaks will want to build a nuclear missle to shoot up into space and blow it to bits.... dang that wont work... the thing is tooling along at 20000mph, is solid metal, and a blast in space is useless. Maybe we can send workers from moon base alpha to fly over, drill a hole into it, and set off a charge deep in its center to blow it to bits.... ya that sounds good.
The predictions would be far more accurate than "the east coast." Everything else you state shows an equal ignorance of the topic. Educate yourself before commenting.
NASA estimates that the asteroid blast over Chelyabinsk occurred at about 14-20 kilometers above the Earth's surface, and that the energy released was equivalent to a 300-kiloton (300,000 tons of TNT). And that was just a small one that's well below the size limits currently searched for. ATLAS would see city killers (LARGE cities), not just glass breakers, that currently are not reliably found in advance of reentering.
And what would you prefer be done about this? Nothing, with doing something costing only 1/18th the cost of one month's worth of US military misadventure in Afghanistan?
it is much ado about nothing..... no warning system is going to help anyone. if you're doomed you're done, period. why invest in a system for absolutely no purpose. now, to record and monitor how the incident happens, that would be a grand idea so we can see over and over again how your useless brain is blown to bits.
Awww. Winston... such a widdle smaddy pants. Are you a freaking idiot? This is why people like you are avoided at parties.... no idea of the big picture or common sense. You are the moron who walks up and starts telling somebody what is in their yummy hot dog right before they take a bite... and you don't understand why sometimes a person just doesn't want to know.... and they sure as heck don't want to hear about the processing plant activities. Ok, tell us all just one time where any agency has been able to pin point even within hundreds of miles where anything is going to fall from the heavens? Oops, can't can ya? And don't give that old line about better tracking systems would give us the answers.... pretty sure we got a pretty good bead on all those satellites and used up space labs that keep crashing down. And the big boom over Russia .... just what would a warning have done? Caused people to run? Run where? And who knew, or would know even today where the boom was going to happen? Have no idea why I typed this other than lost in their own superior world of pseudo knowledge common senseless lame brains such as yourself, really piss me off. Hey, that was fun.
yo - winie - IF the entry angle had been "more toward vertical" the hole would have been 1/2 mile across with debris scattered for some 5 miles or more. It was lucky that it was a tangential approach entry
In Russia, rock throws you.
It happened before in 1908. Almost near the same area. The Sun senses the force on earth and belched out a plume last week in earths direction. This Sun burst super charged Earths magnet field that helped "shield off" the approaching mass. The Sun controls the position of every mass body within it's gravity reach down to the smallest grain of sand it holds in its gravity field. A speeding mass causes pressure pushing the Earth field inward into the Sun, the Sun compensated this pressure. Magnet magic and the tail end of the whip of this magnetic force collided in Russia. If you solar maps these masses and look at the real time position and Earths rotation the converging points do match up over Russia.
go back to 4th grade ig - it's obvious you aren't prepared for 5th grade yet...
Studied impact craters at a graduate level at University of Alaska Fairbanks about ten years ago. This was before bolides came into the public awareness. If a sizeable meteorite physically impacts a water body such as the pacific ocean for example we are looking at a tsunami wave that could in height exceed the height of most coastal mountains (est. 1000 meters) on the west coast of America (of course dependent on angle of approach,type, size and velocity of the meteorite.
If it hits on land the over pressure wave will literally implode your lungs dependent on your proximity to the blast radius. Why do I know this? Studies on pigs with nuclear weapons back in the 50's and 60's. Our nukes cannot compare to a sizable meteorite impact.
Sadly because America does not believe in real science (for the most part) we will decrease our funding in science classes, and accuse legit science of being a conspiracy. This stuff is real, yet we still believe that the world is 4500 years old, and there is no such thing as anthroprogenic climate change.
sadly signed,
shakes head in disbelief
Civilization is 4,500 years old, give or take a millenium or two.
Anthroprogenic climate change is more or less unmanageable.
to 'shakes head in disbelief': Just to let you know, not all of us Christians subscribe to that silly 'earth is 4500 years old and the universe is 6000 years old' nonsense that got started by Cardinal Ussher and Mr. Lightfoot back in the 1200's (I think I may have spelled Cardinal Ussher's name wrong) I acknowledge that the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, and earth also billions of years old.
to 'MajorBurnham'--unfortunately, you may be right about anthroprogenic climate change being more or less unmanageable since it would involve all countries of the world cooperating with each other in NOT polluting and belching out tons of CO2. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.
Civilization's age depends on one's standard and definition for civilization.
Anthropogenic climate change is unmanageable so far, because anthropoids are unmanageable.
only idiotic fundy "young earthers" believe in a 6000 year old earth (of course, there are ENOUGH of the dumfu cks)
In theory, if you wound a ball of wire of different metals like a ball of twine until it got big enough to cause it's own gravity field and then charged it with a positive electrical charges it would leap into space on it's own power.
earth calling iggy earth calling iggy COME IN IGGY (you're cold and wet and it's affecting your "brain")
INCOMING!!!
note to nauts....no kicking dirty iceballs close to home.
Just last week the russian emergency management cheif said, no worry, bigger problem like quakes etc top priority list.....yepper....time for a world rock watch outfit.
Is there anyway we can get odds on this en Vegas?
The Earth is in a perfect orbit position to the Sun and now outside of other planets gravitational effect where no other plant has a triangular magnet position to Earth. The Sun is dominate will respond to the slightest changes in Earths magnetic field direction. The approaching mass caused a riff.
igby, do you just randomly make this stuff up? Or did you simply forget to take your meds?
iggy iggy iggy - get away from daddy's computer - you're showing the world how people with insufficiently developed intelligence "think"
Fascinating to think of such a giant object, moving that fast, plunging into the atmosphere until it reaches a point of sufficient atmospheric density to cause it to explode!
If this large meteor had come straight in at a high angle of incidence, the resulting radiation and explosion would have been hundreds of times greater, and the potential casualties from it could have been in the tens of thousands, with a great many deaths and permanent injuries as a result, depending upon where it hit. Most buildings within 2 - 3 miles would have been completely flattened. Something very important to keep in mind, everyone! - RC
(That really should have read "low angle of incidence", but I was responding in deference to previous posts here so as not to confuse the readers, and sometimes that can be counter productive in the end. Sorry.) - RC
A zero angle of incidence would have resulted in the meteor penetrating the atmosphere to a much lower altitude before it exploded, with most of the energy from that final explosion being concentrated over a much smaller region or area at the same time, resulting in a 2 to 3 mile circular area on the ground being totally destroyed. Ground zero would have been wiped completely clean. - RC
uh carter - WHAT RADIATION? I suggest you confer with our other resident genius iggy...
by the way - look at the meteor crater in Arizona to see what a near vertical impact of an object roughly the same sized (estimated as a "boxcar") did some 15,000 years ago (date might be wrong)
@mike277 Just thought you might like to know that the "Middle East Studs" are the things that are inside of walls holding them together or they are a group of young Men that posed for the " Bad Boys of Beirut 2013 suicide bombers" poster by Farucks Goats LLC , "Middle East Spuds" are a favorite type of potato that the native population likes to cut into strips and deep fry, then eat with ketchup they call "Hunts..for the infidels blood" And then last but not least "The Scud" which is a missile specifically designed to miss anything they are fired at.......
Actually the scud missile is not as poor as the US propaganda machine (aka the Media) would have the American public believing as was the case during the first Gulf War. The Scuds fired into Israel did a considerable amount of damage and took a significant human toll in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The local Puerto Ricans were running down the road yelling Mirar Mirar Mirar meteor meteor Mirar mirar meteor meteor .
One more assumption: The asteroid would not be passing close to the sun. It would likely be invisible in the daytime when coming from that direction.
That was not a meteor.
OK then WHAT WAS IT?
I also heard that if they inject Martian Pee on the asteroids they will explode in space. That's about as close to science as many of your posts. Get a brain, people, or shut up.
I am wiser today then yesterday. Extreme sudden braking in the atmosphere causing meteors to explode with an enormous release of energy was not something I had considered. It was always the shock wave from an impact that concerned me.
It is said that the Gulf of Mexico is actually an impact crater. Now that is an event and so is the one in Arizona. Google Earth the Arizona crater. Quite interesting.
and the Arizona rock was about the same size/weight
The most logical solution is to begin to build a self-sustaining system (www.aquaterraplanetaryholdings.us) that is free from the present limited systems and future extreme climatic events that are likely to occur as we now see and have seen from this Earth's beginning. Our survival and future may depend on this.
What we actually need is a meteor Czar and a special commission funded by taxpayer dollars. That will insure we are never hit by a meteor again.
lets see...a meteor is coming....oh, let me get in the closet....no...wait, I'll go under the bed......no wait....I hide behind some tree.....there is no way that they can saywhere it is going to land ...and how many pieces will break up and land other places........stupid...stupid...worse than stupid..
"That was a good $14.75 BILLION..."
Where'd you get that figure?! The cost mentioned was $0.5 billion. $14.75 billion would multiply by several times the number of telescopes in the entire US observatory system!
And ATLAS catches the smaller, but still potentially very damaging, asteroids that other systems can't. If everyone in that city had been aware of the time that asteroid was supposed to reenter, they would have been away from windows. Plus, this system would be the one that could detect Tunguska sized asteroids that could level large cities just as a thermonuclear bomb would, allowing enough advance warning to evacuate the city.
- Small (<10m) only seen on last day or two.
- Medium (10-140m) seen for days to weeks before impact.
Oh, sure, the cost mentioned is half a billion. When have you ever known a government program to run on budget?
Having an advance warning system in place within two years is a bit late especially when there are no plans to prevent it and possibly save lives. Entry of a meteor's location could be sketchy at best as a guesstimate. If it is large enough, it could be a devastating event. With the extent of government(s) secrets already in place, will truth about what and where be afforded while preventing total panic?
"Having an advance warning system in place within two years is a bit late especially when there are no plans to prevent it and possibly save lives. Entry of a meteor's location could be sketchy at best as a guesstimate."
No and no. Smaller asteroids that are not planet killers, but are city killers, currently cannot be reliable detected in advance of reentry. While there wouldn't be time to deflect them with the warning ATLAS can give, there would be time to evacuate a city. And the reentry point and angle of entry of the meteorite will be well known.
I am so confused. There seems to be a movement for less government intervention in our lives. Now this thread seems to want more government intervention in the form of an early warning meteor strike. So what is it? More government or less government. I suppose it depends on if the intervention will protect you vs. weather it might infringe on your rights.
Personally I don't see any advantage to an early warning meteor system. If the meteor is big enough it won't matter. And if it is big what are you really going to do? I remember the bomb shelters of the late 50s. Seemed like a great idea until you realized you would have to eventually exit them and walk out into a highly radioactive nuclear winter. Game over.
People don't know what they want, honestly. They think they do, but they really don't.
Wake up call?
I'd say so.
It's a wake up call for people everywhere to repent.
The problem is, are YOU listening?
end of daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays.
oh yeah - another fundy nut case interjects BULLS HIT, eh?
It's as if they get hit by one every week or something. I'm sure this "Meteorite" warning system is a weapons warning system.
As a planet we are very rapidly becoming overcrowded. We need something to cull the population.
OK spend Billions to tell me an asteroid is going to hit the EARTH!!!!!!! Then what? Bend over stick my head between my legs and kiss my ASS goodbye. Seems rediculous when we don't have a means to stop it. I saw a guy say last night if we knew 20 years in advance we might be able to stop one. BUT it would take our government21 years to decide to try something. Might as well figure were dead and no big loss.