"OPPOsaurus WRX" (opposaurus)
05/01/2019 at 22:05 • Filed to: None
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"OPPOsaurus WRX" (opposaurus)
05/01/2019 at 22:05 • Filed to: None | 1
| 19 |
in a few years astroid 99942 Apophis will be passing by at something like 20,000 miles from earth. that is about 1/10th the distance to the moon. It is about 1,100 feet in diameter which I ass ume is big enough to make a bad day if it were to hit earth.
so what I was wondering is how close could this thing without causing damage . I think it would be pretty cool if it skimmed the atmosphere enough to maybe light up and , most importantly , keep on going back into space.
NKato
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:23 |
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Stop teasing us with our impending annihilation, God. Just do it already.
Future Heap Owner
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:23 |
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The atmosphere is reaallllllly skinny
BlueMazda2 - Blesses the rains down in Africa, Purveyor of BMW Individual Arctic Metallic, Merci Twingo
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:31 |
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God forbid something like this happen again
boredalways
> BlueMazda2 - Blesses the rains down in Africa, Purveyor of BMW Individual Arctic Metallic, Merci Twingo
05/01/2019 at 22:36 |
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That's supposed to be a Mustang
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BlueMazda2 - Blesses the rains down in Africa, Purveyor of BMW Individual Arctic Metallic, Merci Twingo
> boredalways
05/01/2019 at 22:41 |
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That’s what they want you to think
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OPPOsaurus WRX
> Future Heap Owner
05/01/2019 at 22:47 |
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Y ea but it doesn’t just end, even way up there, there is a little bit. At 250 miles up, would that cause the thing to hat up eough and explode? Would an explosion at 250 miles up be powerful enough to do damage l like what happened in R ussia a few years back?
wafflesnfalafel
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:48 |
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Looks like it’s gonna be damn close this time - less than half the distance to the moon? Wonder how fast it’s going - can we get Musk to fire a Falcon Heavy up there and take a whack at it?
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OPPOsaurus WRX
> NKato
05/01/2019 at 22:48 |
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Is not like the human specie hasn't earned it a few times over by now. We are terrible to the Earth and each other.
DipodomysDeserti
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:49 |
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The Chelyabinsk meteor was only 66ft in diameter and it produced a blast that was 33 times larger than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Something 1,100 feet in diameter, depending on the angle of entry, would cause some problems upon entering our atmosphere.
Racin'Jason002
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 22:55 |
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I would imagine that the Earth’s escape velocity would be a large factor in a scenario such as this. From there the answers could be more defined.
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OPPOsaurus WRX
> DipodomysDeserti
05/01/2019 at 22:56 |
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Wat was the right of the explosion. I'd like it to probably stay a few hundred miles above that.
gmporschenut also a fan of hondas
> wafflesnfalafel
05/01/2019 at 23:06 |
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About as effective as a fly on your windshield
LongbowMkII
> boredalways
05/01/2019 at 23:07 |
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The only possibility is a Tesla roadster
MrDakka
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 23:08 |
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If it’s passing that close, then it’s pretty much the closest it can be without fucking up the Earth.
For reference, geostationary satellites orbit the Earth at 22,236 miles. So Apophis would be passing inside the orbit of some satellites. If we really wanted to, we could capture Apophis using a fuckton of roc kets and use Hohman transfers to make it our second moon.
WRXforScience
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/01/2019 at 23:41 |
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250mi up is higher than the International Space Station. 90% of the atmosphere is in the bottom mile or so.
Apophis is a city killer; however, most of the Earth is empty and most of that is water. Cities don’t actually take up much geographical area.
Apophis is about twice the diameter (so 8 times the volume) of the meteor that caused the Tunguska Event and would have the same destructive power as the largest thermonuclear bombs ever built, but again, it’d probably explode over the Pacific Ocean.
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DipodomysDeserti
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/02/2019 at 00:26 |
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According to wikipedia the blast occured at around 18.5 miles. The Karmen Line (the imaginary line between what is considered space and our atmosphere) is 62 miles above the Earth’s surface. Most meteors burn up in the mesophere, which extends from 31 to 53 miles above the Earth. Beyond 53 miles the atmosphere is probably too thin to wreck a meteor, so they’d pass through if at a shallow angle . However, the International Space Station and most satellites orbit in the thermosphere, which extends from 53 miles to as far as 600+ miles. This is technically still part of out atmosphere, but is considered space. An asteroid passing through this layer at a shallow angle probably wouldn’t explode, but it could wreck a bunch of satellites.
BigBlock440
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/02/2019 at 07:59 |
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There’s a theory that some of the UFO sightings by airline pilots are meteors entering and then exiting the atmosphere. I saw a diagram of how it would look, and it made sense, but I can’t find it on google.
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DipodomysDeserti
> WRXforScience
05/02/2019 at 10:56 |
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According to NASA, Apophis’s currently estimated impact energy is 1,200 Mt. The Tsar Bomba is a 50 Mt bomb.
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=99942
This study predicts the path and effects if the asteroid were to impact Earth in 2036 (which has been given a 1:150,000 chance). They estimate 10 million deaths in S outh America. I’m not qualified enough to analyze their study, but here their abstract. Pretty cool shit.
I’d imagine we’d know months in advance if this thing was going to hit us, allowing for evacuations. However, evacuating that many people from So uth America would also cause incredible upheaval resulting in lots of deaths.
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WRXforScience
> DipodomysDeserti
05/02/2019 at 14:26 |
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Energies for the asteroids and H-bombs aren’t a 1:1 correlation. The primary difference is that the momentum of the impactor is directed downwards so the effects are diminished relative to the same energy bomb (for the bombs nearly all of the energy is directed outwards).
If you take the impact energy of the asteroid (or comet) and divide by 5-10 (impact angle, composition, and a bunch of other factors determine the exact amount) you get the approximate size bomb that’d do the same damage. So for the 1200Mt energy you get about a 120-240 Mt equivalent bomb which is enough to take out a large metropolitan area or a small US state (the Tsar Bomba could be fitted to have a maximum yield of about 104Mt, this was never tested because the plane that dropped it couldn’t fly fast enough to evade the blast) .
Of course, there are secondary deaths caused by widespread fires from the impact as well as from secondary impacts and there are other effects from the impact like tsunamis that can all contribute to the destruction .
If you’re within 15omi radius of the impact you’d have a very bad day, but again, the Earth’s pretty big and empty so the odds of survival are in your favor.