Bobby,
Forget the LHC, you should worry more about large asteroid hitting the earth.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/time-to-take-asteroids-seriously-says-n...The head of Nasa has warned that the threat of a large asteroid hitting the earth should be taken more seriously as the agency prepares to run a simulation to see how officials would cope.
Jim Bridenstine, Nasa’s administrator, acknowledged that such warnings had traditionally been met with a “giggle factor” but said that asteroid collisions were relatively common. “These events are not rare; they happen,” he told the International Academy of Astronautics conference in Maryland.
Mr Bridenstine noted that since 1900 there had been three large impacts: in Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, over Brazil’s Curuca River in 1930 and in 2013, when a 20m meteor exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, also in Russia.
The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded about 14 miles above the Earth’s surface but damaged thousands of buildings. Up to 1,500 people were treated in hospital, mainly for injuries caused by flying debris.
Mr Bridenstine, 43, noted that according to one model we should expect a similar collision every 60 years and that a false sense of security had been encouraged by Hollywood films which depict the earth being saved from annihilation. “We have to make sure people understand this is not about Hollywood,” Mr Bridenstine said as he opened the conference at the University of Maryland.
This week’s exercise seeks to simulate global response to a catastrophic meteorite. The first step is aiming telescopes at the threat to calculate its precise speed and trajectory after rough initial estimates.
Then it boils down to two choices: try to deflect the object or evacuate. Nasa and disaster planners from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) will simulate a response to “inform involved players of important aspects of a possible disaster and identify issues for accomplishing a successful response”.
“The scenario begins with the fictional premise that on March 26, astronomers “discovered” a near-Earth object [NEO]. . .potentially hazardous to Earth,” Nasa wrote.
“In the exercise Nasa and its partners have to respond to a ‘realistic — but fictional — scenario’ involving a NEO named 2019 PDC, which has a 1 in 100 chance of impacting Earth in 2027.”
Asteroids are defined as being near Earth when their orbit around our Sun brings them within 31 million miles. Astronomers are finding new ones each day; more than 700 so far this year, for a total of 20,001, according to Lindley Johnson of Nasa’s Planetary Defence Co-ordination Office. The majority are very small, but 942 are more than a kilometre across, according to researchers.
Among the most risky is a rock named 2000SG344, which is 165 feet in diametre and has a one-in-2,096 chance of striking within a hundred years, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Asteroids are identified mainly by telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii. The ESA has built a telescope in Spain and is planning others in Chile and Sicily.
If an asteroid is less than 50m across the international consensus is to evacuate the threatened region. It is possible to predict the general area it will strike two weeks in advance, according to Detlef Koschny, co-manager of the ESA’s Planetary Defence Office. Days away from impact it can be narrowed down to within hundreds of miles.
Experts advise against blowing apart large asteroids with nuclear weapons because they could create smaller but still dangerous pieces. Instead the plan is to divert the asteroid from Earth. Nasa plans to test this idea on a real asteroid in 2022
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