Comet up to 60 fragments now!

[cyclonebuster]

We think we know so much but yet we know so little! What are the chances a fragment can divert one of the asteroids in this scale in our direction. Up to 60 fragments so far but yet they only report about 30.<br /><br />http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

 

[cyclonebuster]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060501/comet_spa.html<br /><br />"Because comet 73P/Schassmann-Waachmann 3 is so close, Hubble images can resolve fragments down to about 3 miles (5 km) wide, said Weaver. And by putting several images together, they can for the first time track individual small fragments and chart their speeds and directions as they fly off."<br /><br />This is very scary if the smallest pieces we can see are 3 miles wide. If one of those 60 hit us we are doomed.

 

[edawg]

all it takes is a 100ft chunk to make it through the atmosphere ;(. I hope it passes and proves the bible code ppls wrong...This is why we need a deep space radar network,it should be cheap enough

 

[qso1]

Chances of an asteroid diversion are extremelly small because the gravity of either object would be too small for a significant trajectory adjust. An asteroid would have to be travelling practically on top of the cometary fragment to be affected gravitationally at all.<br /><br />Think Mars moons Phobos and Deimos. If you were standing on one, you could run and reach orbital velocity. On the other you could reach escape velocity which would put you in a new orbit around mars assuming you ran in such a way as to avoid recontact. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[qso1]

cyclonebuster:<br />This is very scary if the smallest pieces we can see are 3 miles wide. If one of those 60 hit us we are doomed.<br /><br />Me:<br />As I recall, none of the fragments are headed our way. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[paulanderson]

I noticed that one of the fragments, 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3-BD, is listed here as having a Minimum Miss Distance of only 0.04 LD / 0.00010 AU (very close, about 4% of the distance to the moon):<br /><br />http://tinyurl.com/pcfe8<br /><br />The Nominal Miss Distance is still much greater though, so a hit may still be unlikely, I hope. Closest approach is on May 11.

 

[qso1]

If I were a betting man, I'd bet the peices will pass harmlessly, proving whatever Bible code you are referring to wrong. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>We think we know so much but yet we know so little! What are the chances a fragment can divert one of the asteroids in this scale in our direction.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />Negligible. They really don't have much mass, and there's very little time between now and the flyby for their trajectories to be altered. It's more likely that the propulsive force of outgassing will change their trajectories than gravitational interactions -- and that's not going to change them very much. Not right away, anyway. The debris field should spread out quite a bit over the next few decades. Fragments could eventually intersect Earth, but odds are, by then they'll have broken up even more. Assuming astronomers are right about comets being mostly water, anyway. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[michaelmozina]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Fragments could eventually intersect Earth, but odds are, by then they'll have broken up even more. Assuming astronomers are right about comets being mostly water, anyway.<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />That is an interesting point. If comets aren't mostly water, then the breakup of this comet into so many fragments is bound to cause trouble for the Earth, sooner or later. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[cyclonebuster]

If you look at this there are some asteroids that could interact with them. How far away are these asteroids from the fragments at the closest approach for all 60 fragments???<br />http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/<br />

 

[cyclonebuster]

All 60 of these found fragments are 3 miles wide. How many are 1 or 2 miles wide that have not been found? I bet it is way more than 60 and where are they???

 

[michaelmozina]

Now that I've looked at the images, it looks to be disintegrating in typical comet fashion, with the particles continuing to break apart in the coma. Since the main comet fragments are going to be traversing the plasma that is flowing off the sun for the next couple of weeks, I suspect these house sized particles coming off the fragments continue to "burn up" in the solar atmosphere. Whatever comes out the other side will need to be tracked, but I wouldn't go all "Chicken Little" just yet. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[cyclonebuster]

OOPS!! My bad! Up to 61 now.<br />http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db_s...&search=Search<br /><br />Seems like they are finding more everyday now. Ever hear of "Murphys Law"? "If something bad can happen it will happen!"How many have not been detected and where are they? Look how close the first fragment can come to us. Who's to say there are not any others we can not see?<br /><br />http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_...t_min&sdir=ASC

 

[michaelmozina]

The funny thing about that first "chunk", is that the nominal miss distance is 10 lunar distances greater than any of the rest. I suspect the small minimum miss distance relates to simply not being able to track it as accurately as the rest of the group. The average nominal miss distance is over 20 lunar distances, so it seems very unlikely we have a lot to worry about.<br /><br />There have been some near misses we never saw coming that were less than 1 lunar distance. We only tracked them out the other side. Those are the ones you aught to be worried about IMO. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[paulanderson]

<i>The funny thing about that first "chunk", is that the nominal miss distance is 10 lunar distances greater than any of the rest.</i><br /><br />Some of the other chunks farther down at the bottom of the list do have a very similar nominal miss distance, up to 33.9 LD (compared to 33.7 for the first one). But none of them have a similar minimum miss distance of only 0.04 LD, so I was wondering about that discepancy, also.

 

[cyclonebuster]

What bothers me the most is how many other fragments they have not noticed yet that could do damage??

 

[harmonicaman]

Depending on how small you wish to go; there are well over 1,000,000 pieces of debris created by this break-up (is it too late to build myself an emergency bunker...).

 

[cyclonebuster]

Lets say 200 feet across? How Many?

 

[michaelmozina]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Lets say 200 feet across? How Many?<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />You won't have much trouble convincing me that we will need to carefully study the objects that pass by us at around 22 LD's. I do not see however any convincing evidence to suggest that any of these comet fragments pose an immediate threat, at least not in this pass. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[cyclonebuster]

Why won't they tell us how many are this size or larger?

 

[michaelmozina]

Probably because they don't really have that kind of resolution, and the don't fully understand what each "dot" might represent just yet. You could have a melting snowball leaving behind a tadpole like wake behind every object. You might never know if you're looking at a solid object or a "steam cloud" of some sort. That object may be mostly iron and nickel in which case it's going to be far more substancial. It is however a little early to tell, and they won't really know for sure until they see what comes out the other side of the event and they can study what remains a bit more carefully. Once it has been within 22 LM, and folks have had time to crunch the numbers a bit, then you'll get some estimates on size. At the moment, I think they just don't have enough data to answer those kinds of questions. There is still quite a debate about the overall composition of these objects. I think because of the ambiguity, they simply note the various objects at the moment and they will "wait and see" how things change over the next few weeks. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[cyclonebuster]

I don't like it. We should be able to detect an object 50 meters across easy.

 

[michaelmozina]

Determining the core size is a lot tricker than it sounds when measuring comet debris at the edge of the sun. This is because all comets (and probably fragments of comets) create comas around themselves when they get this close to the sun. Hubble can't even risk imaging objects too close to the sun for fear of damaging it's equipment. <br /><br />I think you'll see a lot more data in terms of sizes of things once the comet debris gets fruther from the sun and closer to the earth. Then we really will be able to tell the cores of objects from the comas of these same objects. I'm sure this breakup will spawn of lot of interest and many new theories. The sizes of the broken fragments will be of keen interest to everyone involved. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> It seems to be a natural consequence of our points of view to assume that the whole of space is filled with electrons and flying electric ions of all kinds. - Kristian Birkeland </div>

 

[cyclonebuster]

I agree with that. It will be interesting to study but they should be able to tell what size they are by the size of the coma!!

 

[harmonicaman]

But the coma's aren't uniform for every piece. Here are some factors other than <b>size</b> which may influence coma development:<br /><br /><b>1. Material composition</b> I believe a fragment with a higher stone and/or metal content may actually produce a larger coma (in some cases) because these darker materials will absorb more of the Sun's heat and tend to quickly boil off adjacent ices; but a near totally rocky or metal comet fragment may only produce a negligible coma.<br /><br /><b>2. Rotational speed</b> A rapidly spinning fragment may produce a larger coma because it presents more surface area to the heat of the Sun.<br /><br /><b>3. Lee side shielding</b> A fragment caught in the shadow (or the lee) of another piece's coma will receive less heating from the Sun and will produce a diminished coma.<br /><br /><b>4. Shape</b> The shape of the debris may effect what portions receive the Sun's heat.<br /><br />I'm sure there are other factors too!