Crucial question after asteroid near-miss: How big was rock in Olympic pools?

Re: To further calms the nerves

Because the pile of rubble that blew up over Russia is too small for us to care about. We don't even bother looking for anything that small; they can't do relevant amounts of damage when compared to the truly monumental expense of trying to track those things.

Do you know how many Russia-meteor-sized balls of snow and gravel slam into this planet every century? Rather a lot. Thing is, we're mostly ocean. They tend to blow up over the ocean where fucks are simply not given. If that thing had blown up over New York or London, it would be a Bad Thing. Yet fixing a city's worth of windows and coping with a few additional injuries is actually quite a bit less than the epic amount of money it would cost us to ring the planet with enough high-resolution telescopes with rapid-tracking systems (and enough fuel!) to start hunting Sol's detritus.

There's roughly zero political capital in funding science to begin with. Funding science at that scale in order to discover (and then prevent?) events that – on the scale of nations – are fairly irrelevant would be political suicide.

To put it more bluntly; you are significantly more likely to be hurt crossing the street to get a coffee than any of us are being killed by a Russia-meteor-sized pile of space debris. For the same money we'd have to spend fending off this unlikely boogyman, we could build continent-spanning automated personal vehicle networks that would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

In reality, we'll piss it all away on superbowl commercials and dodgy lawsuits against people running file locker sites. Because we're human. Are those quarterly reports ready yet? I've got a meeting with the senator from Nebraska at 2:00 to go over them...

Cheers.

Re: To further calms the nerves

Err...seemingly there was another big one over Japan and yet another over LA. The videos are on the internetty someplace.

Re: To further calms the nerves

Russian minister was right... i can think of a plausable technique too... U.S might have de-orbited a rock from metioride belt. And it is very easy to do that.. u dont have stop its orbit.. slightly nudge .. i belive a single small thruster can do that... since tragectory can be calculated of commets millions of miles away... rocks from metioride belt can be used as surgical strike!...

Re: "The meteorite has been estimated at 17 metres" A mere pebble in other words :P

Doubly amusing because even if the fighters were airborne at the time, and actually in a position/heading to perform an intercept and travelling at their maximum speed (lets assume a mig does 2.1mach in favourable conditions), the rock was (allegedly) still travelling at 54,000km/hr...

...a mere 20x faster than the fighters top speed. It would be like trying to outsprint a TGV when it came past at full tilt (I could have quoted a UK intercity train, but frankly you might actually win).

I heard of one planet that got potted into a black hole, in a game of inter-galactic bar billiards. Killed 10 billion people. Only scored 10 points as well...

Re: "Its orbit is now known, lol

It's more that the orbit is known within a certain level of error (probably a few hundred or thousand km for it's next close pass), but for each future time it passes the influence of Earth's gravity, that level of error multiplies, until you're once again looking at the extreme end of the possible orbit path crossing Earth, but that is still requiring the outlying value to be the correct one in each case, rather than a value near the mean path.

As time progresses, and future near passes occur, the level of error can again be reduced until we know that it either will or won't hit us in 2080 or other future dates.

Back to olympic swimming pools, the major flaw in the Beeb's analogy is that these pools are only 25 metres wide and 2 metres deep (they can be up to 3 metres), for a volume of 2500m³, while the asteroid is 45 metres in diameter, and assuming a perfect sphere (not likely as it doesn't have the mass to self-collapse into a spheroid), that gives a volume of approximately 47700m³.

Re: Hmm...

Pah- just another day on Metaluna...

Re: But how much does it weigh...

In orbit? Approximately 0.