A small asteroid (~5 m) will hit Sudan on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC | Hacker News Reader

A small asteroid (~5 m) will hit Sudan on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC

tech.groups.yahoo.com

38 pointsd0mine29 comments

Poor headline. It might hit Sudanese airspace, but not "Sudan" as in the land forming that country. It might not even high Sudanese airspace, as it'll burn up in the "upper atmosphere."

Agreed.

"hit Sudan" is not as precise as "hit Earth this morning, Oct. 7th, and exploded in the atmosphere over northern Sudan." http://www.spaceweather.com/

See this press release: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200819.html

For a moment I thought "~5 m" meant that it was going to be around 1/3 of the "15 m" asteroid that hit earth and caused dinosaurs to go extinct.

Explain, for us astronomically-challenged, please?

This little asteroid will be 5 m(eters) in diameter, quite a lot less than 15 m(iles) in diameter. :)

Note that if we're talking about the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater, most references seem to have the size a bit smaller, ~6 miles in diameter. Still, that's a big rock.

Remember the story about the NASA-engineers who mixed up imperial and metric units?

...and fueled the Space Shuttle up with 900000 grams of liquid oxygen?

The US doesn't use imperial units.

Sorry. I meant to reference the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter (http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/unit-mixups.html#mco).

A little animation http://www.astronomy.ru/forum/index.php?topic=45265.0

Minor Planet Electronic Circular http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

Anyone know if this is something of significance, or is this just going to put a little hole in the ground?

Aside: Poor (people of) Sudan. Like that country needs more issues.

"It is very unlikely that any sizable fragments will survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere." http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html

In other words, barely news.

it's the first time something like this has been predicted though. that's something.

Fair point, I missed that.

Not to mention the 1kt energy is not too shabby, even if it's far up.

"Objects of this size would be expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere every few months on average but this is the first time such an event has been predicted ahead of time."

That's pretty significant/awesome.

Oh yes, the poor population of Sudan, huddled together on 5 meters of ground, and that is the exact 5 meters that gets hit by an asteroid. What are the odds?

You do realize that meteor impacts affect more than just the immediate area, right?

Well, we're talking in different terms here. I happen to be aware how the geography and population density of Sudan looks like. It's a huge country with lots of desert and a very low population density in most of the area. I could drop Switzerland on top of Sudan and only a few goats would blink.

This is an example of miscommunication based on assumed knowledge.

You do realize that we're talking nuclear bomb type levels of energy here... even if Sudan is an African Canada, random nukes do have consequences. :-)

It is only 1 kiloton. The 1908 Tunguska meteor was ~10-20 megatons, and caused no known deaths or injuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

According to that Wikipedia article, kiloton-range bolides (airburst meteors) typically occur on Earth more than once per year.

A stony meteoroid of about 10 metres (30 ft) in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to that of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and data released by the U.S. Air Force's Defense Support Program indicate that such explosions occur high in the upper atmosphere more than once a year.

What will the impact be?

Nothing serious.

"Small Asteroid Predicted to Cause Brilliant Fireball over Northern Sudan" http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

"The absolute magnitude indicates that the object will not survive passage through the atmosphere."

WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, WAKE UP SHEEPLE

It's as much as an "impact" with Earth as dropping a sweetner in your coffee is an "impact."

Excellent. A post that teaches me something about hacking and about how to become a better entrepreneur at the same time.

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