Heads up: Asteroids: The good, The bad and the ugly

[big_dav_2001]

On now on SBS 2

Davin

[Larryp]

Thanks

[Astro_Bot]

Thanks.

For those of us living in the past (QLD), that's 19:30 on SBS2 .... which is about 50 minutes away as I type.

[MrB]

Also 7:30pm for those of us in WA, (Wait Awhile ;) ) so just under 2 hours away.

[Astro_Bot]

It was a good doco. Plenty of real science and light on the hyperbole, although some of the numbers have been revised down as a result of the WISE survey.


[Spoiler Alert]

I was surprised (as I'd not heard of it before) but, in 2008 (?), a real asteroid was detected, computed to be on a collision course with Earth, with impact in 19 hours, and then tracked to impact with all the appropriate authorities informed along the way (e.g. "Mr President, it's NASA on the line. You're going to want to take this."). Luckily it was a small one, and it impacted in the middle of the Nubian Desert.

But, not to worry. There's only 20,000 or so near-Earth objects larger than 100m in diameter, and each impact would probably only be equivalent to a several-megaton warhead. ;)

Actually, most of the potentially dangerous ones are thought to have already been found. But it's the ones they don't know about that worry me!

[/Spoiler Alert]


There were some quite nice night-scape pictorials in the background while a voice-over was going.

[Nico13]

I seem to recall seeing a doco some time back on the one that crashed into the desert they had a lot of uni students out hunting for the remnants after the impact as they had cleared the area of all known people before hand.

Was interesting and I'm guessing it was the same one as mentioned above.

Cheers

[Deeno]

Thanks Davin!

[JC]

Also available on youtube; though Im not sure if its complete..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIstWPzKlUI