Asteroid 2012 DA14: May hit Earth on Feb15th 2013: Updated

An asteroid named 2012 DA14 is moving towards the Earth, in fact according to the NASA Neo JPL site (LINK) it has a very similar orbit to earth, and has probably been there for thousands of years.

On February 15, 2013, the asteroid will fly at a distance of 26 900 km (16,715miles from the center point of Earth). This distance is 6000 miles closer than some of the satellites orbiting the Earth from a distance of 35,700 km. There is no guarantee that the asteroid will hit or will miss, there is simply not enough data, but it is close enough to be affected by our gravity potentially being pulled to earth, it all depends on trajectory, speed and luck!

The odds of it hitting us is approx  1 in 83,000, however to put this in perspective, the odds of winning the UK National Lottery is 1 in 13,983,816, remember someone wins nearly every week. The odds are in our favor for a miss, however there is still a maybe.

There is a possibility the asteroid will collide with Earth, but further calculation is required to estimate the potential threat and work out how to avert possible disaster, NASA expert Dr. David Dunham told students at Moscow’s University of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM).
“The Earth’s gravitational field will alter the asteroid’s path significantly. Further scrupulous calculation is required to estimate the threat of collision,” said Dr. Dunham, as transcribed by Russia’s Izvestia. “The asteroid may break into dozens of small pieces, or several large lumps may split from it and burn up in the atmosphere. The type of the asteroid and its mineral structure can be determined by spectral analysis. This will help predict its behavior in the atmosphere and what should be done to prevent the potential threat,” said Dr. Dunham. (RT)

If this asteroid did hit the earth, the impact could destroy a city, the devastation and loss of life would be horrific. We must be aware of these events, remember the Government will not give enough warning worried about panic. So stay informed!

The asteroid was first detected by the Spanish Observatorio Astronomico de La Sagra on the 23rd Feb 2012. The size of the asteroid is not clear, but may be anywhere between 40-150 meters. Astronomers will continue to monitor the asteroid to find out the exact size and path.

The estimated size of 2012 DA14 places it in the same category as the celestial body that, scientists say, exploded over western Siberia in 1908. The Tunguska blast,  knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles).

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320607#ixzz1oRXWki00

Though many theories exist concerning the event on Podkamennaya Tunsguska River, the leading explanation is a space body more than 50 meters in size blew up in the atmosphere, the blast being at least 1,000 more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945

Scientists suggest confronting this asteroid with either a 'big gun' or with a special heat reflecting paint.

"With the asteroid zooming that low, it will be too late to do anything with it besides trying to predict its final destination and the consequences of impact."

A spaceship is needed, experts agree. It could shoot the rock down or just crash into it, either breaking the asteroid into debris or throwing it off course.

NASA expert David Dunham suggested: “We could paint it.” The paint would change the asteroid's ability to reflect sunlight, alter its spin and change its temperature.

However, even taking the asteroid off course is unpredictable and could be dangerous when it returns in 2056, according to Aleksandr Devaytkin the head of the observatory in Russia’s Pulkovo, as told to Izvestia in Russia recently.

"The new trajectory could cause a direct hit on its next visit."

The problem with either option is that there is the lack of time, for development of such a system and early enough deployment to make a difference, building a spaceship to deal with 2012 DA14 will take at least two years.

The asteroid has proven a bitter discovery. It has been circling in orbit for at lest three years already, crossing Earth’s path several times, says space analyst Sergey Naroenkov from the Russian Academy of Sciences. It seems that spotting danger from outer space is still the area where mere chance reigns, while asteroid defence systems exist only in drafts.

Still, prospects of meeting 2012 DA14 are not all doom and gloom.
“The asteroid may split into pieces entering the atmosphere. In this case, most part of it will never reach the planet’s surface,” remarks Dunham.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320607#ixzz1oRY7GCpM

What this does show is that there are many objects in our solar system that we do not know about, never dismiss anything without investigation, even then there is always new information.

So when people dismiss Planet X, Nibiru, etc, it is through ignorance and narrow mindedness. Always remain open to the possibilities!


Quote NBC News".. though this asteroid may miss us, experts say there is nothing wrong in getting your affairs in order..."

 NBC News report

Remember it is only a matter of time:

Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 will pass within 0.85 lunar distances from the Earth on November 8, 2011

99942 Apophis will pass in 2029 (odds of missing is 1 in 250,000), depending on that pass it will either hit us or miss us in 2036, if it hits us it WILL wipe out most of life on earth

Apophis Link: http://lifetimeandus.blogspot.com/2011/08/asteroid-apophis-real-threat.html

For up to date info follow me on Twitter: @LifeTimeUs

Links:
Earth Impact Risk Summary: neo.jpl.nasa.gov
Orbit Diagram: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov
Impact Risk: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ip?2.2e-04
Contributed source:  http://rt.com/news/paint-asteroid-earth-nasa-767/

Asteroid Apophis: A Real threat

Friday the 13th of April 2029 could be a very unlucky day for planet Earth. At 4:36 am Greenwich Mean Time, a 25-million-ton, 820-ft.-wide asteroid called 99942 Apophis will slice across the orbit of the moon and barrel toward Earth at more than 28,000 mph. The huge pockmarked rock, two-thirds the size of Devils Tower in Wyoming, will pack the energy of 65,000 Hiroshima bombs--enough to wipe out a small country or kick up an 800-ft. tsunami. 


Also check: LINK: Asteroid 2012 DA14

On this day, however, Apophis is not expected to live up to its namesake, the ancient Egyptian god of darkness and destruction. Scientists are 99.7 percent certain it will pass at a distance of 18,800 to 20,800 miles. In astronomical terms, 20,000 miles is a mere stone's throw, shorter than a round-trip flight from New York to Melbourne, Australia, and well inside the orbits of Earth's many geosynchronous communications satellites. For a couple of hours after dusk, people in Europe, Africa and western Asia will see what looks like a medium-bright star creeping westward through the constellation of Cancer, making Apophis the first asteroid in human history to be clearly visible to the naked eye. And then it will be gone, having vanished into the dark vastness of space. We will have dodged a cosmic bullet. 

Data is still being analysed, it is not clear what the exact trajectory will be.

Maybe. Scientists calculate that if Apophis passes at a distance of exactly 18,893 miles, it will go through a "gravitational keyhole." This small region in space--only about a half mile wide, or twice the diameter of the asteroid itself--is where Earth's gravity would perturb Apophis in just the wrong way, causing it to enter an orbit seven-sixths as long as Earth's. In other words, the planet will be squarely in the crosshairs for a potentially catastrophic asteroid impact precisely seven years later, on April 13, 2036.

Radar and optical tracking during Apophis's fly-by last summer put the odds of the asteroid passing through the keyhole at about 45,000-to-1. "People have a hard time reasoning with low-probability/high-consequence risks," says Michael DeKay of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication at Carnegie Mellon University. "Some people say, 'Why bother, it's not really going to happen.' But others say that when the potential consequences are so serious, even a tiny risk is unacceptable."

Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, now 71, knows a thing or two about objects flying through space, having been one himself during a spacewalk on the Apollo 9 mission in 1969. Through the B612 Foundation, which he co-founded in 2001, Schweickart has been prodding NASA to do something about Apophis--and soon. "We need to act," he says. "If we blow this, it'll be criminal."

If the dice do land the wrong way in 2029, Apophis would have to be deflected by some 5000 miles to miss the Earth in 2036. Hollywood notwithstanding, that's a feat far beyond any current human technology. The fanciful mission in the 1998 movie Armageddon--to drill a hole more than 800 ft. into an asteroid and detonate a nuclear bomb inside it--is about as technically feasible as time travel. In reality, after April 13, 2029, there would be little we could do but plot the precise impact point and start evacuating people.

Diagram: How to Off An Asteroid

Fortunately, Apophis needs to be nudged only about a mile to avoid a gravitational "keyhole" in space--a region that would send the asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Otherwise, it would have to be diverted 5000 miles for it to miss our planet. This reduces the energy required to deflect Apophis by a factor of about 10,000--making it theoretically possible using current technology. A number of methods have been proposed to do the job.

According to projections, an Apophis impact would occur somewhere along a curving 30-mile-wide swath stretching across Russia, the Pacific Ocean, Central America and on into the Atlantic. Managua, Nicaragua; San José, Costa Rica; and Caracas, Venezuela, all would be in line for near-direct hits and complete destruction. The most likely target, though, is several thousand miles off the West Coast, where Apophis would create a 5-mile-wide, 9000-ft.-deep "crater" in the water. The collapse of that transient water crater would trigger tsunamis that would hammer California with an hour-long fusillade of 50-ft. waves. 

BUT DON'T EVACUATE just yet. Although we can't force Apophis to miss the Earth after 2029, we have the technology to nudge it slightly off course well before then, causing it to miss the keyhole in the first place. According to NASA, a simple 1-ton "kinetic energy impactor" spacecraft thumping into Apophis at 5000 mph would do the trick. We already have a template for such a mission: NASA's Deep Impact space probe--named after another 1998 cosmic-collision movie--slammed into the comet Tempel 1 in 2005 to gather data about the composition of its surface. Alternatively, an ion-drive-powered "gravity tractor" spacecraft could hover above Apophis and use its own tiny gravity to gently pull the asteroid off course. 

In 2005, Schweickart urged NASA administrator Michael Griffin to start planning a mission to land a radio transponder on Apophis. Tracking data from the device would almost certainly confirm that the asteroid won't hit the keyhole in 2029, allowing everyone on Earth to breathe a collective sigh of relief. But if it didn't, there still would be time to design and launch a deflection mission, a project that Schweickart estimates could take as long as 12 years. It would need to be completed by about 2026 to allow enough time for a spacecraft's tiny nudge to take effect. 

NASA, however, is taking a wait-and-see attitude. An analysis by Steven Chesley of the Near Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., concludes that we can safely sit tight until 2013. That's when Apophis swings by Earth in prime position for tracking by the 1000-ft.-dia. radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This data could also rule out a keyhole hit in 2029. But if it doesn't, the transponder mission and, if necessary, a last-resort deflection mission could still be launched in time, according to Chesley. "There's no rush right now," he says. "But if it's still serious by 2014, we need to start designing real missions." 

About 100 tons of interplanetary material drifts to the Earth's surface on a daily basis. Occasionally, an object hurtles with enough force to leave a mark. 
ASTEROIDS are large rocky or metal bodies that originate in the relatively warm inner solar system, in the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. 
COMETS are composed mostly of water ice and rock, and form in the cold outer solar system beyond the planets' orbits. Scientists believe comets may have delivered the first organic compounds to Earth billions of years ago. 
METEOROIDS are either pieces of asteroids that collided in space, or debris released by vaporizing comets. When meteoroids enter Earth's atmosphere, they are called meteors, and when they reach its surface they are called meteorites. So far, the remnants of more than 160 impact craters have been identified on Earth. Here are six of the most notable: 

35 MILLION YEARS AGO

CHESAPEAKE BAY CRATER
Maryland
Diameter: 53 miles
Cause: 1- to 2-mile-wide meteorite
Claim to fame: Though long ago filled in by soil and water, this is the largest impact crater in the U.S. The event that caused it fractured bedrock more than a mile deep, creating a saltwater reservoir that still affects the region's groundwater.

35.7 MILLION YEARS AGO
POPIGAI CRATER
Siberia, Russia
Diameter: 62 miles
Cause: 3-mile-wide asteroid
Claim to fame: The crater is flecked with industrial-grade diamonds created by shock pressure on graphite. A recent theory posits that this asteroid and the Chesapeake Bay meteorite originated from one asteroid.

50 THOUSAND YEARS AGO
BARRINGER CRATER
Arizona
Diameter: 4100 ft.
Cause: 150-ft.-wide meteorite
Claim to fame: Also called "Meteor Crater" (above), this is the first impact crater ever identified on Earth, as well as the best preserved one. In the 1960s, astronauts went there to practice sampling techniques for the Apollo program.

65 MILLION YEARS AGO
CHICXULUB BASIN
Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico
Diameter: 110 miles
Cause: 6-mile-wide asteroid
Claim to fame: This impact triggered enormous tsunamis and magnitude 10 earthquakes. Scientists believe it led to the extinction of dinosaurs and of 75 percent of all species, effectively ending the Cretaceous Period.

1.85 BILLION YEARS AGO
SUDBURY CRATER
Ontario, Canada
Diameter: 155 miles
Cause: 6-mile-wide comet
Claim to fame: On the crater floor, heat from the impact and cometary water fed a system of hot springs possibly capable of supporting life. The rim of the crater also holds one of the world's largest supplies of nickel and copper ore.

BILLION YEARS AGO
VREDEFORT DOME
South Africa
Diameter: 236 miles
Cause: 6-mile-wide comet
Claim to fame: Though now the most eroded, Vredefort is the oldest and (at impact) the largest such crater on Earth. It was created by the world's greatest known energy release, which may have altered the evolution of single-cell organisms.

Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart holds a model of the asteroid 1998 KY26.

IN 1998, CONGRESS mandated NASA to find and track near-Earth asteroids at least 1 kilometer in diameter. The resulting Spaceguard Survey has detected, at last count, about 75 percent of the 1100 estimated to be out there. (Although Apophis was nearly 2500 ft. short of the size criterion, it was found serendipitously during the search process.) Thankfully, none of the giants so far discovered is a threat to Earth. "But any one of those couple of hundred we haven't found yet could be headed toward us right now," says former astronaut Tom Jones, an asteroid-search consultant for NASA and a Popular Mechanics editorial adviser. The space agency plans to expand Spaceguard to include asteroids down to 140 meters in diameter—less than half the size of Apophis, but still big enough to do serious damage. It has already detected more than 4000 of these; NASA estimates approximately 100,000 exist. 

Predicting asteroid orbits can be a messy business, as the history of tracking Apophis in its 323-day orbit demonstrates. Astronomers at Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory discovered the asteroid in June 2004. It was six months before additional sightings—many made by amateurs using backyard telescopes—triggered alarm bells at JPL, home to the Sentry asteroid-impact monitoring system, a computer that predicts the orbits of near-Earth asteroids based on astronomical observations. Sentry's impact predictions then grew more ominous by the day. On Dec. 27, 2004, the odds of a 2029 impact reached 2.7 percent—a figure that stirred great excitement in the small world of asteroid chasers. Apophis vaulted to an unprecedented rating of 4 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a 10-step, color-coded index of asteroid and comet threat levels. 

But the commotion was short-lived. When previously overlooked observations were fed into the computer, it spit out reassuring news: Apophis would not hit the Earth in 2029 after all, though it wouldn't miss by much. Oh, and there was one other thing: that troublesome keyhole. 

The small size of the gravitational keyhole—just 2000 ft. in diameter—is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it wouldn't take much to nudge Apophis outside it. Calculations suggest that if we change Apophis's velocity by a mere 0.0001 mph—about 31 in. per day—in three years its orbit would be deflected by more than a mile, a piddling amount, but enough to miss the keyhole. That's easily within the capabilities of a gravity tractor or kinetic energy impactor. On the other hand, with a target so minuscule, predicting precisely where Apophis will pass in relation to the keyhole becomes, well, a hit-or-miss proposition. Current orbit projections for 2029 have a margin of error—orbital scientists call it the error ellipse—of about 2000 miles. As data rolls in, the error ellipse will shrink considerably. But if the keyhole stubbornly stays within it, NASA may have to reduce the ellipse to a mile or less before it knows for sure whether Apophis will hit the bull's-eye. Otherwise, a mission risks inadvertently nudging Apophis into the keyhole instead of away from it. 

Can we predict Apophis's orbit to the submile level far enough in advance to launch a deflection mission? That level of forecasting accuracy would require, in addition to a transponder, a vastly more complex orbital calculation model than the one used today. It would have to include calculations for such minute effects as solar radiation, relativity and the gravitational pulls of small nearby asteroids, none of which are fully accounted for in the current model. 

And then there's the wild card of asteroid orbital calculations: the Yarkovsky Effect. This small but steady force occurs when an asteroid radiates more heat from one side than the other. As an asteroid rotates away from the sun, the heat that has accumulated on its surface is shed into space, giving it a slight push in the other direction. An asteroid called 6489 Golevka, twice the size of Apophis, has been pushed about 10 miles off course by this effect in the past 15 years. How Apophis will be influenced over the next 23 years is anybody's guess. At the moment we have no clue about its spin direction or axis, or even its shape—all necessary parameters for estimating the effect. 

IF APOPHIS IS INDEED headed for the gravitational keyhole, ground observations won't be able to confirm it until at least 2021. By that time, it may be too late to do anything about it. Considering what's at stake—Chesley estimates that an Apophis-size asteroid impact would cost $400 billion in infrastructure damage alone—it seems prudent to start taking steps to deal with Apophis long before we know whether those steps will eventually prove necessary. When do we start? Or, alternatively, at what point do we just cross our fingers and hope it misses? When the odds are 10-to-1 against it? A thousand-to-1? A million? 

When NASA does discover a potentially threatening asteroid like Apophis, it has no mandate to decide whether, when or how to take action. "We're not in the mitigation business," Chesley says. A workshop to discuss general asteroid-defense options last June was NASA's first official baby step in that direction. 

If NASA eventually does get the nod—and more important, the budget—from Congress, the obvious first move would be a reconnaissance mission to Apophis. Schweickart estimates that "even gold-plated at JPL," a transponder-equipped gravity tractor could be launched for $250 million. Ironically, that's almost precisely the cost of making the cosmic-collision movies Armageddon and Deep Impact. If Hollywood can pony up a quarter of a billion in the name of defending our planet, why can't Congress?

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/deep/4201569

Future Earth Impact 2036: Asteroid Apophis

Updated: Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Death By Giant Meteor

In April 2029, the asteroid Apophis will come within about 18,300 miles (29,450 km) of Earth, with a 1-in-250,000 chance of hitting us. Depending on a variety of variables will determine whether or not it will hit the earth in 2036.

The head of Russia's federal space agency has said it will work to divert an asteroid which will make several passes near the Earth from 2029.

Anatoly Perminov told the Voice of Russia radio service that the agency's science council would hold a closed meeting to discuss the issue.

Any eventual plan is likely to be an international collaboration, he said.

The US space agency said in October that there is a one-in-250,000 chance of Apophis hitting Earth in 2036.

THIS IS IMPORTANT

Mr Perminov said Roscosmos' science council would hold a 'closed meeting'

That announcement was a significant reduction in the probability of an impact, based on previous calculations that put the chances at about one-in-45,000. The asteroid is estimated to pass within about 30,000 km of the Earth in 2029.

Mr Perminov, who is the chief of Roscosmos, gave little detail of any plans that the agency has, but was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying that the solution would not entail the use of nuclear weapons.

Other schemes that have been put forth in the past for diverting asteroids from collision courses include spacecraft that nudge the space rocks out of their trajectory through force, or diverting them with "solar sails" that use the wind of particles ejected from the Sun.

"People's lives are at stake," Mr Perminov reportedly told the radio service Golos Rossii (Voice of Russia).

"We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people."