[HN Gopher] Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% an...
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Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
Author : 2-3-7-43-1807
Score : 143 points
Date : 2025-01-29 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cneos.jpl.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (cneos.jpl.nasa.gov)
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| Full link:
| https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y...
| perihelions wrote:
| You can email hn@ to ask them to fix a link.
|
| The title bot likes to strip URL parameters.
| dang wrote:
| In this case it changed the link because
| https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html was listed as
| the canonical URL on the page. We've reverted that now.
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now. Thanks!
| lambdadelirium wrote:
| What can be done to increase the asteroid impact probability?
| gear54rus wrote:
| Ask AI how to avoid it and implement the suggestions because
| it's a brand new word-salad-generator-3000 that is 346% more
| efficient at spewing nonsense :)
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Don't become the very thing you claim to hate!
| jdmoreira wrote:
| We can land on it, drill and plant nukes inside to shatter it
| chrsw wrote:
| That's not what they asked
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It would definitely increase impact probability though.
| chrsw wrote:
| Not necessarily. See my new comment above. In addition,
| depending on how far out you do it, gravity will allow it
| to reform. And if it never reforms because you blew it to
| dust headed out to interstellar space you wont get an
| impact either. It's not at all a simple problem.
| ta1243 wrote:
| That would create far more objects, many on the same rough
| direction, thus increasing the chance of an impact
| chrsw wrote:
| Only if you managed to leave the trajectory the same if
| it was already on a collision course or change the
| direction to a collision course. Do you think you can
| control that with a nuclear explosion? You probably don't
| know enough about to the system to make a high confidence
| prediction of the new outcome.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Can't tell why I'm hearing "I could stay awake just to hear
| you breathin" in my head when reading the above
| vasco wrote:
| Get a lot of people to jump at the same time to nudge us into
| the path.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| that's a beautiful idea. it will only work if we act together
| as one human race. this is the moment where we have to put
| political conflicts aside and commit collective suicide.
| skykooler wrote:
| This would move the Earth by less than the width of an atom:
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
| devsda wrote:
| So, we all have to just skip for a while ?
|
| There's a Sci-Fi Plot in there somewhere:
|
| A hero tries to and succeeds in persuading govts to
| organize a planet scale skipping effort to get earth closer
| to a passing by rock and escape an impending disaster on
| earth.
| vardump wrote:
| GP didn't specify Earth.
| mherrmann wrote:
| God I love HN.
| Timwi wrote:
| We're gonna need a bigger rock.
| Malcolmlisk wrote:
| Monke, smash!!
| Trasmatta wrote:
| And can we speed up the timeline? 2032 is too far away.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Can we also add mass to the asteroid?
| Qem wrote:
| Waiting. In general the probability increases as more data is
| gathered, and the error ellipse shrinks with the Earth still
| inside. Then is suddenly drops to zero in the overwhelming
| majority of cases, when the Earth finally gets out of this
| shrinking error ellipse.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Been rooting for Asteroid/Meteor in the recent presidential
| elections.
| chrsw wrote:
| The best way I can think of is similar to what I heard from
| Jaron Lanier (he may not be the first person to explain this).
| Basically what you do is send something massive out there that
| will gravitationally tug it into a collision course with Earth.
| Obviously this will take quite a bit of time but if your
| calculations are correct it will pretty much guarantee impact.
| arto wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_YR4#2032_potential_impact
| jonstewart wrote:
| If Mt of asteroid impact roughly equates to a nuclear weapon,
| then this is pretty bad for a metropolitan area but not enough to
| put a big dent in humanity.
| chrsw wrote:
| I think it if it's far enough out you only need to change it's
| trajectory only very slightly to reduce to the probably of
| impact to something much less
| ta1243 wrote:
| There's a 3 in 4 chance an asteroid hitting the earth will hit
| water, and of the remaining change about 50/50 it hits a desert
| or ice sheet (Antarctica, Greenland).
| jonstewart wrote:
| Hitting an ice sheet might be worst case scenario for global
| impact.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The stripe where this object could hit is mostly at low
| latitude.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Sorry could you expand / clarify this comment? What would
| make this more likely to hit near the tropics?
| adzm wrote:
| The risk corridor calculated here https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/File:2024_YR4_risk_corridor.pn...
| perihelions wrote:
| This is not an increase over baseline risk (as its Palermo
| scale[0] indicates, being a negative number, -0.56).
|
| I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards,
| because with the very awesome new telescope[1] that's going
| online this year, the number of these detections is going to
| drastically go up. The number of _objects_ isn 't going up--
| they've always been there, we just didn't know--but I think the
| media coverage is not going to absorb that nuance very well.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar... (
| _" A rating of 0 means the hazard is equivalent to the background
| hazard (defined as the average risk posed by objects of the same
| size or larger over the years until the date of the potential
| impact)_")
|
| [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-
| c-r... ( _" With its capacity to detect faint objects, [Vera]
| Rubin is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and
| comets by a factor of 10 to 100"_)
| roenxi wrote:
| HOWEVER this is an excellent time to review
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_structures_on_E...
| in particular the S2 to S8 spherule beds found in South Africa
| (AKA "the big one(s)" or "we are less than dust in the eyes of
| the gods").
|
| The universe is a big place with some big rocks in it. There
| are also some !!fun!! simulations of things like the Vredefort
| impact on YouTube.
| jofer wrote:
| See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield
| (debris over 10% to 30% of the Earth's surface from an impact
| ~788,000 years ago). Smaller, for sure, but very recent and
| large enough for "nuclear winter" type scenarios.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why crisis? People should simply not look up.
| lioeters wrote:
| On the other hand, if people are told constantly to look up,
| eventually they stop looking.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Or maybe we just build a system that can reliably detect
| and deflect asteroids and resolve the concern.
| virtualritz wrote:
| > Why crisis? People should simply not look up.
|
| I don't understand why this apt pun on that movie is being
| downvoted.
|
| Would anyone of the downvoters of parent care to explain?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Puns are for Reddit, not HN.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Someone eats plain bran cereal for breakfast...
| adastra22 wrote:
| HN's value proposition is high signal-to-noise
| discussion. Jokes and meme comments work against that.
| cscheid wrote:
| (I worked tangentially on software for analyzing data that will
| come from the Vera Rubin telescope, and) yeah, while it was
| designed for spotting weird supernovae and such, the first half
| of its operation is expected to be dominated by the discovery
| of near earth objects.
| DennisP wrote:
| So you're calling it a "crisis" that people will be better
| informed of the risk they've always faced? Seems to me we
| should use that media coverage to build political support for a
| real asteroid defense system.
| perihelions wrote:
| If the media does not contextualize risks correctly, as it
| never does, it's absolutely a crisis--a crisis of a poorly-
| informed, panicked society lashing out and doing irrational
| things.
|
| It's not a costless error if a warped illusion of risk drives
| countries to, i.e., deploy nuclear-tipped space weapons for
| asteroid defense, which then precipitate a _genuine_ crisis.
| It 's not obvious that having more defenses is obviously
| safer than having less; some thoughtful people have argued
| the opposite:
|
| > _" In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection
| technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century
| history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine
| guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection
| system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses.
| Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent
| catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10^-5 would
| surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable
| catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of
| potentially apocalyptic technology."_
|
| https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/368501a0 ( _"
| Dangers of Asteroid Deflection"_ (1994), Carl Sagan & Steven
| Ostro)
| DennisP wrote:
| In this case, the context is "we face the same risk all the
| time, from asteroids we don't see." I'm not convinced
| that's reassuring.
|
| The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids, which are
| correspondingly more rare. For asteroids in the 8MT impact
| range, it doesn't make much military sense to launch deep
| space missions to divert them years in advance, rather than
| delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in minutes. Given any
| competent asteroid defense system, an asteroid diversion
| would be detected immediately and countered, and the
| perpetrators would face consequences.
|
| In fact, since we already have rockets that can reach
| asteroids, I'd say the possibility of malicious diversion
| makes a defense system _more_ important.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" The Sagan paper concerns much larger asteroids,
| which are correspondingly more rare."_
|
| That's a fair distinction--the paper predates the modern
| telescope surveys that are discovering all the small
| ones.
|
| - _" rather than delivering nukes directly with ICBMs in
| minutes"_
|
| You'd still need multiple years for those nukes to have a
| useful effect. (The change in velocity is instant; the
| change in position is not). They wouldn't be ICBM's,
| either: we'd need a new type of deep-space delivery
| vehicle, far larger than a suborbital ICBM. That'd
| probably trigger a new type of nuclear arms race.
| DennisP wrote:
| Sorry, what I mean is: why would I use my rocket and nuke
| to divert an asteroid years in advance, when I can drop
| an 8MT nuke on you directly in 30 minutes with much more
| accurate targeting?
|
| One possible reason is plausible deniability, but that
| goes away if we have a good asteroid defense system with
| an emphasis on early detection.
| perihelions wrote:
| Ah, I understand now.
|
| For one thing, you could weaponize asteroids as a second-
| strike response, if there's an imbalance where one
| superpower has asteroid deflection and one does not. Even
| if it's delayed by months, the certainty that the
| asteroid will _eventually_ hit establishes a deterrent
| against attacking the asteroid-controlling country. If
| there 's defenses against ballistic missiles, this
| circumvents those.
|
| For another, the asteroid-deflecting nukes are dual-use
| as weapons themselves. A nuclear warhead in deep space
| defeats conventional ballistic missile defenses. If that
| warhead is turned towards Earth, that (first-strike)
| attack's not visible to the adversary until a few seconds
| before impact--unlike an ICBM launch, which has tens of
| minutes of warning, enough to launch (conventional)
| interceptor missiles.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Eh, we already have steath aircraft that could slip in
| past air defenses and drop a nuke with next to no
| warning. We _probably_ have a stealthy hypersonic that
| can also do so. That doesn 't negate a nations second
| strike ability.
|
| Part of the reason the US, Russia and China have _vast_
| land based missile fields is to visibly show the enemy
| that they 're gonna have to wipe out huge swaths of land
| with hundreds of nukes (and THEN sink our boomers) to
| have a successful first strike.
| perihelions wrote:
| Right; but if the enemy thinks that's likely to happen,
| it'd only take them 15 minutes to nuke that one airbase
| that stores all the B-2's. Strategic bomber aircraft
| aren't very useful weapons for superpowers fighting each
| other (or else we'd have a lot more B-2's).
|
| Space-based weapons (which are banned by treaty) are more
| like submarine-basing, in that the enemy isn't
| necessarily sure where they are; but, in addition to
| that, they have potentially very short warning times
| before a strike. No one actually _wants_ that unstable
| dynamic, with the short /no-warning; which is why all the
| nuclear powers have (so far) agreed by treaty not to
| build any.
|
| edit: But if someone were to build a _civilian_ spaced-
| based asteroid defense, which involved sending nuclear
| weapons into space... that could get destabilizing fast.
| Whether or not Sagan can predict specifics, the big-
| picture idea of humans not trusting each other with
| apocalyptic weapons is not wrong.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >we'd need a new type of deep-space delivery vehicle, far
| larger than a suborbital ICBM.
|
| Like...starship?
|
| > That'd probably trigger a new type of nuclear arms
| race.
|
| Why on earth would there be an arms race on something
| designed to deliver nuclear payloads to deep space? The
| _only_ way I could see that happening is if we had
| nuclear armed deep space colonies? (See, the expanse)
| sharpshadow wrote:
| This. It's a crucial step for our civilisation to be able to
| protect earth from any incoming dangers be it asteroids or
| Umuamua type objects. There must be a global effort with all
| countries to build such a system.
| rob74 wrote:
| Good luck with that... currently we are failing to muster a
| global effort for tackling climate change, which is a much
| more pressing issue than an asteroid which may or may not
| hit us. I know
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up is satirical,
| but reality often outdoes satire, so I wouldn't be
| surprised if things would play out exactly like in that
| movie...
| timewizard wrote:
| There is open doubt as to whether climate change, as
| presented, is truly a near-term existential issue.
|
| There is no doubt that an asteroid hitting earth is.
| freen wrote:
| There is an open doubt whether a fully functional coffee
| machine is currently orbiting Venus, however one of these
| hypotheses is different than the other.
|
| Hint: expertise matters, evidence matters, and in a field
| where buildings/laws/fields of study get named after
| successful contrarians, a long streak of effectively
| unanimous consensus should not be undervalued.
| speps wrote:
| Two terms I never heard in the table for the asteroid:
|
| Parlermo Scale
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo_Technical_Impact_Hazar...
|
| Torino Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
| teepo wrote:
| I used genAI to help me understand the Palermo scale number
| seeming low.
|
| The 2032 asteroid does warrant tracking, but the Palermo Scale
| remains below a critical level because:
|
| The impact probability (1.2%) is not high enough to trigger a
| stronger alarm. The background frequency of 8 Mt impacts is
| relatively high, making this event less statistically
| exceptional. The event is still 8 years away, so uncertainties in
| orbital prediction remain.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I find it fascinating that some people may brag about not using
| their brain like that...
|
| Asking a LLM about topics you have no idea about it a great way
| to be misled by hallucinations, don't do that.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| It's actually a great way to find concepts to verify and ask
| questions about. You will often find out about tangential
| topics you otherwise would not have.
|
| I find it fascinating that people brag about refusing to even
| try to learn to use new tools just because they don't know
| how to use them effectively.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > I find it fascinating that people brag about refusing to
| even try to learn to use new tools just because they don't
| know how to use them effectively
|
| Interesting how you jump to conclusion based on nothing.
| Had you checked my profile (even though it's even more
| obvious from my Reddit one) you'd have seen that I'm
| actually pretty savvy when of comes to language models.
|
| But knowing your tools also implies knowing their limits.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I really don't care to check the profile of someone who
| comes on HN to insult someone else's intelligence. Your
| experience or clout don't give you the right to behave
| that way.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Yet you behave the exact same way ...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I asked a parrot about quantum physics and it told me I'm a
| pretty bird.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Could be LLM generated spam post to promote LLM generated
| spam?
| yread wrote:
| > Uncertainty region (3 sigma): 1.65 million km
| redeux wrote:
| For reference the Tunguska event, which was projected to be a 5MT
| explosion on the low end, flattened about 2000 square kilometers
| when it airburst. If this hits the ocean it would no doubt cause
| some large tsunamis.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
| teepo wrote:
| This one could be like Tunguska, an air bust maybe around 10km
| high. Would that cause a large tsunami?
| simne wrote:
| It depends, on where exactly will hit. Similar to nuclear
| explosions, if one happen over sea or ocean near coast, it
| will cause extremely large wave, which will be similar to
| tsunami. If it will hit land, will be small earthquake.
|
| This is why nearly all nuclear explosions was over land or
| far from coast. Few experiments near some coast or island,
| created tsunami-like wave on those coast (island), which
| considerable widen polluted territory (ocean is usually
| considered as self-cleaning).
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Only very locally, the Japan tsunami was an order of magnitude
| more energy and aiui earthquake tsunamis happen particularly
| with certain kinds of seafloor displacement. It's not just
| about the amount of energy but how that energy is applied,
| impact energies dissipate quickly with distance.
| layer8 wrote:
| Working link:
| https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y...
|
| 8.1 megatons of kinetic energy. According to the Torino rating,
| only risk of "localized destruction" (less than "regional
| devastation"):
| https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/torino_scale.html
| beastman82 wrote:
| *megatons of TNT. 1 MT of TNT = 4.14*10^15 joules
| kristjansson wrote:
| So you wouldn't want to be under it, but a good-sized hill
| would be enough cover?
| simne wrote:
| Yes, deep underground shelter planned for nuclear attack
| will be enough to survive, as damaging mechanisms, are
| mostly same - short but very powerful infrared flash and
| deadly shockwave (better to consider it as very fast
| pressure grow and then pressure drop).
|
| Just staying behind hill, will be not enough cover from
| shockwave, so people will suffer from fast pressure
| changes.
|
| But shockwave quickly weakened as square of distance, and
| hill will make it's path longer. So, something like 100m
| hill could be considered as moving border of deadly zone
| 100m closer to epicenter.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Comparable in energy to a B-53 nuclear bomb, minus the
| radiation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb
| layer8 wrote:
| So a 14 km blast radius it seems.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Unless it lands in the ocean in which case tidal waves, and
| if on land, probably an earthquake/shockwave.
| ortusdux wrote:
| A comparable ocean impact would be the 2004 Indian Ocean
| earthquake, which was about 3x more energetic.
| Gare wrote:
| I'd assume quakes transform much more energy into tsunami
| waves than meteorite hit does.
| dang wrote:
| Link fixed now. Thanks!
| thekevan wrote:
| According to Perplexity Pro:
|
| Answer The newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, with a 1.2%
| chance of hitting Earth in December 2032, has a potential
| impact energy of 8 megatons (Mt) of TNT equivalent23. To put
| this in perspective, this would be more than 500 times more
| powerful than the atomic bomb used in World War II3. Impact
| Scenarios
|
| City Impact:
|
| A direct hit on a populated area would be catastrophic,
| potentially destroying an entire city. The impact would create
| a significant crater and generate powerful shock waves that
| could demolish buildings and infrastructure for miles around.
|
| Ocean Impact:
|
| If the asteroid hits the ocean, which is more likely given
| Earth's surface is 70% water, the effects would be less severe
| than Hollywood depicts: About 80% of the impact energy would be
| spent vaporizing water and forming a crater Only 0.1% of the
| energy would go into wave formation Most water would be thrown
| into the atmosphere rather than forming devastating tsunamis5
| However, if the impact occurs within 60 miles (100 km) of a
| shoreline, it could still cause significant coastal damage
| through local waves and hurricane-force winds.
|
| Countryside Impact:
|
| An impact in an unpopulated area would create a substantial
| crater and potentially trigger:
|
| * Local seismic activity
|
| * Blast waves affecting the surrounding region
|
| * Possible fires from the thermal radiation
|
| * Ejection of debris into the atmosphere
|
| Atmospheric Effects The most significant consequence of an
| ocean impact would be the injection of water vapor into the
| stratosphere, which could affect climate patterns7. For land
| impacts, the main concerns would be:
|
| * Creation of a crater
|
| * Generation of powerful shock waves
|
| * Possible regional environmental effects from dust and debris
|
| * Local thermal radiation damage
|
| The good news is that most likely the asteroid will miss Earth
| entirely, and even if it hits, the most probable scenario is an
| ocean impact far from populated areas
| daedrdev wrote:
| Yeah it is bad and a lot of damage if it hits somewhere
| populous but my understanding is we've tested nukes that
| powerful
| renjimen wrote:
| Largest was the Tsar Bomba at > 50 megatons!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
| barbegal wrote:
| I guess the probability of impact won't reach the >50% level
| until a few months before impact due to variations in earth's
| orbit and by that point the ability to do anything about it is
| limited.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > due to variations in earth's orbit
|
| I don't see how this could possibly be correct. Earth's orbit
| is very precisely known.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| So is anyone working on increasing those odds?
| belter wrote:
| This will flatten a city not destroy civilization, so people
| are waiting and hoping it will be somewhere around 1154-1158
| Ocean Blvd, FL...
| scrumper wrote:
| Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
| skykooler wrote:
| Given the predicted time, could we calculate which hemisphere is
| most likely for it to impact?
| belter wrote:
| It is listing 6 possible impacts.
| adastra22 wrote:
| But not the location.
| shrx wrote:
| It has already been calculated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2024_YR4_risk_corridor.pn...
| jcims wrote:
| About 16x the energy of the Chelyabinsk meteor.
| 34679 wrote:
| It's 1.2% cumulative over 6 passes that begin in 2032.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| 1.3e-2 on the first pass, e-6 range and smaller on the
| following ones
| pella wrote:
| 2032 Mayan prophecy + 2024 YR4 = prime fuel for internet-born
| doomsday cults.
|
| _" The final katun in the sequence that must happen before the
| new cycle of the katuns begins again is 13 Ahau. This starts in
| 2032 and ends in 2052. It is the time from 2032 to 2052, that
| great earth changes may take place.
|
| The translation from the codices about 13 Ahau that starts in
| 2032 is 'Famine, plagues of locusts, and loss of rulers. The
| judgment of God' Mr. Scofield goes on to elaborate on this katun.
|
| 'This is a time of total collapse where everything is lost. It is
| the time of the judgment of God. There will be epidemics and
| plagues and then famine. Governments will be lost to foreigners
| and wise men and prophets will be lost.'
|
| It is my perception that the great crisis that many fear in 2012
| may well start after 2032. An interesting note to this time
| period is that it did bring great revolution and change during
| the time period from 1776 to 1796."_
|
| https://www.tokenrock.com/mayan-astrology/2012-mayan-prophec...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Hilarious. That article was written in 2021. We call that
| moving the goalposts.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| With the size of the asteroid, is this one where we could use the
| gravity tractor[1] or the Yarovsky Effect[2] techniques for
| deflection, or is there not enough lead time?
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_tractor 2.
| http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021plde.confE.119A/abstrac...
| simne wrote:
| To change orbit of so large asteroid, need huge amount of
| energy.
|
| Unfortunately, humanity now have only small power ready, for
| such far things just about 50kW, it will need decades to
| transfer so large energy.
|
| Russians claimed to create nuclear reactor for space with
| somewhere near 200kW, but unfortunately, now these are just
| words, very far from real hardware.
| ddahlen wrote:
| I work on the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO
| Surveyor) writing simulation code which predicts which objects we
| will see. This one has drummed up a bit of interest due to its
| (relatively) high chance of impact. I actually spent quite a bit
| of time yesterday digging through archive images trying trying to
| see if it was spotted on some previous times it came by the Earth
| (no luck unfortunately). Since we saw it so briefly, our
| knowledge of its orbit is not that great, and running the clock
| back to 2016 for example ended up with a large chunk of sky where
| it could have been, and it is quite small. We will almost
| certainly see it again with NEO Surveyor years before its 2032
| close encounter. I have not run a simulation for it, but I would
| not be surprised if LSST (a large ground telescope survey which
| is currently coming online) to catch it around the same time NEO
| Surveyor does.
|
| Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy,
| because of surface reflectivity, small shiny things can appear as
| bright as dark large things. This is one of the motivations of
| making the NEO Surveyor an IR telescope, since IR we see black
| body emission off of the objects, which is mostly size dependent,
| and only weakly albedo dependent.
|
| There is an even tinier chance that if it misses the Earth in
| 2032, it could hit the moon. I haven't run the numbers precisely
| for that one, but it impacted a few times in some monte-carlo
| simulations.
|
| If anyone is interested in orbit dynamics, I have open sourced
| some of the engine we are using for observation predictions:
| https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete
|
| It is relatively high precision, though JPL Horizons has more
| accurate gravitational models and is far better suited for impact
| studies. My code is primarily for predicting when objects will be
| seen in telescopes.
| formerphotoj wrote:
| Thank you. Why I read HN!
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| If in 2032 an impact did occur, how much time before that
| impact would be able to ascertain over 50% probability of
| impact? hypothetically.
|
| That is, does the certainty increase steadily or non-linearly
| over time? Does near certainty of an impact occur from
| measurements taken just minutes before the impact, or hours,
| days, years?
| slackerIII wrote:
| Great post, thank you!
|
| Where does the uncertainty (1%) come from? For example, is it
| more from our ability to precisely determine the orbit based on
| limited observations, or is it because orbits for objects like
| this just aren't predictable years out, or something else?
| renjimen wrote:
| Parent mentioned Monte Carlo simulations, which allow you to
| simulate across a range possible scenario parameters and see
| what % result in some outcome (like a collision with Earth or
| the moon).
| VierScar wrote:
| I'm sure there's a reason, but it seems like an unusual use
| of Monte Carlo - it's all deterministic and there is no
| opposing player making choices. Must have something to do
| with uncertainties in projected orbits or imperfect
| simulations maybe?
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Uncertain observations, I'm sure
| sdenton4 wrote:
| There's going to be some degree of measurement error, which
| will likely be greater for objects which have not been
| observed many times. Multiple observations should allow both
| better estimation of the object attributes (average out the
| noise), and allow some judgement of the quality of
| predictions given what you think you know about it.
| timewizard wrote:
| > JPL Horizons
|
| A slight tangent.. but my favorite thing about Horizons is that
| they still maintain a telnet interface to their system. Once
| you learn to use it it's quite a bit of fun to play around with
| it.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That warms my heart on a winter night.
| twism wrote:
| Don't Look Up Vibes
| graycat wrote:
| Is that probability of an impact 1% or 1 = 100%????
| qnleigh wrote:
| 1%
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| it says 1% in the title, what's there to misunderstand?
| Willingham wrote:
| The impact to society would be much greater on a sociological
| scale then on a physical scale, many nukes are more than 8Mt, the
| likelihood of it hitting a highly populated area is lower still.
| elric wrote:
| I don't think I understand your comment. The yield of nukes is
| of no consequence if they're not being used, so I don't think
| the comparison stands?
| Willingham wrote:
| My point is, we have used nukes, so we know exactly what the
| worst case scenario is, and that's about 20-50 million
| lives(hitting Tokyo or NYC). Equal to the number of deaths
| during the Spanish flu or half of world war 2. I think the
| comparison helps us understand what the risk truly is. I
| think the world would panic and likely loose more lives
| through chaos than the actual impact.
| NunoSempere wrote:
| I have an article looking at similar probabilities here:
| <https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/how-likely-are-various-
| prec...>; for asteroids we gave 0.02% per decade of killing >= 1M
| people.
|
| One thing to consider is that for a 55m asteroid like this one to
| do a lot of harm, it not only has to hit the earth, it has to hit
| it somewhere very populated. (only about 0.3% of the earth is
| very urban https://nunosempere.com/blog/2024/10/16/urban-share/)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Thatll be dpn jrs first term so expect a "dont look up" sequel
| billiam wrote:
| fingers crossed!
| joeevans1000 wrote:
| Will the guess of an outcome improve over time?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It would have been scary even 2 years ago but by that time AI
| would solve that, maybe even turn it into some sort of mining
| operation
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