Tuesday, September 22, 2015
No, Neither an Asteroid nor a Comet will hit us in September
The intertubes are currently buzzing with rumours about the imminent collision of an asteroid (or 2.5 mile wide comet) with Earth over the next few days (some are quite specific stating that the asteroid or comet will hit on the 23rd of September, others give a range of dates between the 20-30th of September). Often the headline says "NASA confirms", which it hasn't.
The identity of the comet or asteroid is either not given or identified with 2015 GA14 (which misses Earth by 77 times the distance between Earth and the Moon) and 2012 TTD (which misses Earth by 21 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon). Neither are 2.5 kilometres wide. Neither will hit us.
There are three other asteroids that come close in this period (33 metres to 100 metres in diameter, nowhere near 2.5 Km wide), but they also miss the Earth by over 14 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. To put this in perspective, Apollo 11, travelling at over 7 kilometres per seconds took 3 days to get from the Earth to the Moon. That's a long, long way away.
So not, we are not going to be hit by them. And there are no big asteroids sneaking up on us. Seriously, amateur astronomers are picking up smaller rocks than this all the time so a 2.5 Km rock or comet would be spotted well before time.
Heck, as I write we are watching comet C/2013 US10 head towards perihelion, it is coming nowhere near Earth.
But it should be obvious that this is all a hoax, remember how asteroid DA2013 cl2 was going to wipe out all life on Earth back in 2013? That was a hoax, as was asteroid 2014 AZ5, How about the Mayan Calender apocalypse? Comet Elenin? Comet ISON? All theses "end of the worlds" were hoaxes which passed (although comets Elenin and ISON were real comets, we were never in any danger from them).
So to help you ignore the hysteria over rocks that will come nowhere near us, I give you the I've made a Celestia file for 2012 TT5. As usual, copy the data here to a plain text file (2012TT5.ssc) and copy the file to the Celestia extras folder.
====================2012TTD.ssc==========================
"2012 TT5" "Sol"
#Data from MPC http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html
#Epoch 2015 June 27.0 TT = JDT 2457200.5 MPC
#M 346.05031 (2000.0) P Q
#n 0.32951954 Peri. 273.02601 +0.24722473 +0.96748968 T = 2457242.83342 JDT
#a 2.0759423 Node 11.70885 -0.75140474 +0.22617386 q = 0.7171772
#e 0.6545293 Incl. 15.23443 -0.61177679 +0.11317733 Earth MOID = 0.05522 AU
#P 2.99 H 21.7 G 0.15 U 5
#From 59 observations 2012 Oct. 6-Nov. 5, mean residual 0".32.
{
Class "asteroid"
Mesh "ky26.cmod"
Texture "asteroid.jpg"
Radius 0.1 # maximum semi-axis
MeshCenter [ -0.000718 -0.000099 0.000556 ]
EllipticalOrbit
{
Epoch 2457200.5 # Epoch 2015 June 27.0 TT = JDT 2457200.5
Period 2.99 # P
SemiMajorAxis 2.0759423 # a
Eccentricity 0.0520041 # e
Inclination 0.6545293 # Incl.
AscendingNode 11.70885 # Node
ArgOfPericenter 273.02601 # Peri
PericenterDistance 0.7171772 # q
MeanAnomaly 346.05031 # M
}
RotationPeriod 0.9 #Guess
Albedo 0.15 #Based on typical Stony asteroids, rotation periods vary from one hour to one day
}
========================================================
Labels: asteroids, comet, Hoax
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 1:46 am 
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