Killer Asteroid Threatening Earth

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Asteroid Relief? About blooming time.

Remember last issue when we were talking about our pet worry … Deep Impact-type scenarios being worked out for real on our pleasant little blue celestial body?

Well since then, there has been urgent calls issued by a number of bodies and governments for the creation of an international task force to set up a Star Wars-style anti-asteroid program.

The cause for all this frantic worry? Sorry to disappoint you, despite our undoubted web-based prowess in the science fiction field, it wasn't Sfcrowsnest.

Actually, the Earth had a near miss with a rock over a third of mile wide, shortly after we issued our prescient piece of journalism.

The 2000 QW7 asteroid flew out of the debris belt between Mars and Jupiter, passed within a couple of million miles of the Earth early in the morning, and was only detected by Cornell University's Arecibo Observatory a meagre six days before it brushed past the Earth.

Let's paint that in colours you can understand. What, a million plus miles, that's way far out! Actually, it's only eleven and a bit times further away than the orbit of the moon. It's the cosmic equivalent of being shot in the head and losing your cap and a couple of hairs.

If that 2.6m miles near-miss is terrifying, consider this. In 2027, an asteroid nearly half a mile wide called 1999 AN10 will skim past Earth within only 200,000 miles. It's solar orbit will bring it back again at least a couple of times - possibly even closer each time.

In the UK, Lembit Opik, an asteroid threat-clued up member of parliament was reported in the British Press as saying: "It is as if someone had thrown a marble at you across a tennis court and missed your head by the width of your hand. It is all very well saying it didn't hit us, but if it had been 2.4 million miles this way, which is peanuts, we wouldn't be here talking about it today."

One of the really worrying things was something of this size was only detected six days before possible impact. Forget NASA launching a shuttle laden down with atomic warheads and a suicide crew. There wasn't even a decent launch and interception window in that six day period.

What was there enough time to do? Well, hey, just about enough time for the US President to commandeer 100 years' worth of canned food supplies and retreat to NORAD SAC's underground survival centre with a mixed-sex regiment of army and airforce types and hunker down and wait for a chance to play Adam and Eve.

If the thought of the giga-death of humanity doesn’t bother you, surely the thought of Earth being recolonised by the - probably by that stage, cannibalistic - descendants of Bill and Hilary Clinton does!

Aside from the direct impact damage in the area hit, what would the effect of an impact have been on Earth? Let's say the asteroid was the same size as the one that did for poor old Tyrannosaurus Rex … estimated at seven miles wide.

First-off would have been a fiery shockwave that a little after half an hour would have been smashing down the last explorer's flag on the poles - the only humans structures that could have survived this deadly gale would be either underground, or a handful of nuclear hardened surface buildings.

Most the world's forests and greenery, from the rain forests of New Zealand to the leafy glades of Wales, would be blown apart and burning. This hell-sent tornado would be intermingled with earthquakes and tidal waves ripping apart land masses and flooding any piece of land not high-ground or mountainous.

Dust and dirt from the impact would combine with ashes from the burning earth and volcanoes slammed into spewing activity, covering the outer atmosphere with a pall of night. Some of this material would fall to Earth burning, adding to the fierce fires in our vegetation. The rest of it would descend more gradually as black snow, acidic enough to fatally poison almost every fresh water supply on the planet for nearly thirty years.

Enough dust would remain floating in the atmosphere to cause a dark, century-long winter in which the Terran food chain would almost completely break down. Acid rain would fall for a decade, burning the skins of the few living survivors.

So survivors, what about them? Insects perhaps. Some plankton. Deep sea fish, used to the darkness and cold. Rats might make it in a few spots. Enough to jump start evolution, at any rate.

A small cadre of humanity could survive if it was well protected enough, with enough provisions and material to last out the first couple of hundred years. Frankly, we're not too sure about that, though.

It was, of course, an asteroid strike on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula 65-million years ago that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs most other species.

How about a smaller 'roid impact, say the Tunguska asteroid that hit Russia's Siberia in 1908, estimated at a paltry 60 metres-wide. If the Tunguska 'roid hit London dead centre, everything inside the M25 motorway would be hit by a nuclear-force blast and vaporised.

These impacts are now believed to happen every hundred years or so … there's been a similar to Tunguska sized impact crater discovered in the Iranian desert, which has been dated to the late 1960s. Another was found in the Brazilian jungle, dated to 1947.

Interestingly enough to historians, a larger - comet - impact off the sea of Japan has recently been traced to a Nuclear Winter in the Middle Ages that reduced the human population that time to around a half of what it had been before the strike.

Comets are a bigger threat than asteroids, if only because they tend to shoot out at random from the icy Oort Cloud of rubble that circles the solar system. This makes them impossible to catalogue and in theory they could reach Earth only 80 days after being 'created'.

Spooked by the growing body of evidence, the British government is proposing spending around £25m on a program, nicknamed SpaceGuard, to protect the UK from comet and asteroid damage.

In charge of this noble effort is Lord Sainsbury of Turville, Britain's science minister, who wants to set up a chain of telescopes to catalogue and monitor threatening rocks.

Its definition of threatening is rocks between 50 yards and half a mile in size … leaving the real biggies to NASA (By 2006, Nasa also wants to track and catalogue all rocks of a size to prove ELEs - extinction level events).

The watching stations, possibly sited in Northern Ireland's Armagh - and working with partner countries around the globe - would be the initial part of a wider program to detect and deflect these terrible agents of extinction.

For further reading on this subject …

NASA Near-Earth Object Program

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

The purpose of the Program is to co-ordinate NASA-sponsored efforts to detect, track and characterise potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that could approach the Earth. The NEO program focuses on the goal of locating at least 90 percent of the estimated 1,000 asteroids and comets that approach the Earth and are larger than 1 kilometre (about 2/3-mile) in diameter, by the end of the next decade. In addition to managing the detection and cataloguing of Near-Earth objects, the NEO Program office is responsible for facilitating communications between the astronomical community and the public should any potentially hazardous objects be discovered.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/asteroid.shtml

A documentary by the British BBC called Earth in the Cosmic Firing Line.

Asteroids hitting Earth and taking out major cities is the stuff of Hollywood sci-fi. But recent research has revealed that Earth is hit much more often than we thought and could be struck again in our lifetime. It won’t be a monstrous mountain-sized asteroid, Earth is rarely in their way, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of danger.

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