Close calls for the earth

[SilverCougar]

Rather intresting to watch

Scary just seeing how many astiroids do pass by the Earth....

[The Silver Thong]

That is very scary !!! allot of close calls ! Now i'm scared

[Raptor]

The scale of the image is misleading, plus it doesnt't appear to take the 3rd dimension in to account.

[Picturesque Orion]

Oh boy. We are soooo lucky

[RollingThunder06]

Sometimes I think being ignorant of some things is bliss. Seeing this once again renews that fact that those who can protect us are slow in doing their job. Isn't it only recently that they land a probe on an asteroid? Has any experiments been carried out to see if it is possible to destory or push away one of these things?

[Ravinar]

its one big shooting gallery out there. if you want proof all one need do is look at are moon to see a good example of what the earths bean through. the only reason earth doesn't look like that is because we gots an atmosphere. but you realize its a small and feeble shield when you see whats out there and we haven't even seen half of whats out there

[Conspiracy]

ah were doomed

[ACfishing2]

I think they said in 3000 years it is 100% chance that the earth will be hit by an asteroid.

[Annointer]

How big does a rock have to be to be an asteroid?

[cerberusxp]

In revelations it says we are going to be hit by not one, but two.

[SilverCougar]

*snickers* To be honest.. to think we won't be hit by an asteriod is rather ignorant. Don't need any kind of religious prophacy to tell you that. Heck the Earth gets hit by millions of space debris.. meteorites and such every year. they just burn up, or atleast partly burn up, in the atmosphere.

Hopefully... by the time one comes and actually is going to hit us, we'll have some way to deflect it.

[Apocalypsse]

Knowing the way the governments of the world are going atm we wont have that kind of technology for a long time. Lets just hope something that will cause lots of damages misses us until we have some half decent space program going (technology wise).

[Hazzard]

The scale of the image is misleading, plus it doesnt't appear to take the 3rd dimension in to account.

Exactly.

However, there are lots of "rocks" out there, one day a big one will hit. Remember the Shoemaker-Levy 9 VS Jupiter, back in 1994!!

Have a look here. Mass extinctions and impacts, and some modern impact events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event

Edited October 10, 2006 by hazzard

[DogsHead]

I once saw a site where you could plug in various parameters (composition of asteroid/comet, make-up of surface impacted, angle of penetration, speed of entry, etc) and it would return with damage stats, blast radius, pressure damage, crater size; it was fantastic!

If I can find I'll post it here and you can all get even more scared!

Oh, I think it even gave a percentage chance of such an impact!

[Hazzard]

I once saw a site where you could plug in various parameters (composition of asteroid/comet, make-up of surface impacted, angle of penetration, speed of entry, etc) and it would return with damage stats, blast radius, pressure damage, crater size; it was fantastic!

If I can find I'll post it here and you can all get even more scared!

Oh, I think it even gave a percentage chance of such an impact!

That would be greate, hope you find it.

[frogfish]

How big does a rock have to be to be an asteroid?

It could be the size of a grain of sand to the size of Manhattan, but the key is that it hits the earth and doesn't get burned up in the atmosphere...The earth is constantly being hit by asteroids...I think it's safe to say that within the next month, an asteroid will hit somewhere...