Asteroid 2018 RC - passing Earth September 9, 2018

[Art Blade]

"On September 9, 2018, at 8:06 a.m. EDT (USA east coast time), Asteroid 2018 RC will pass 224,000 km (140,000 miles) from the Earth."


This recently (September 3rd) discovered asteroid is going to pass Earth at around 0,0015 astronomical units or 225,000 km distance, closer than the Moon's distance which is roughly 384,000 km on average.

More related information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth_in_2018

[Dweller_Benthos]

That's pretty close, uncomfortably close. It's also close enough to change the orbit of the asteroid just slightly so that maybe next time around, it hits. Or the time after that... or it moves further away, I'm sure they are keeping track of it now that they know where it is. Being a bit on the small side, it's not a planet-killer or an E.L.E. (extinction level event), but it would make a big hole and cause some serious problems, especially if it hit land and anywhere near a population center. But most likely it would hit water and cause huge tsunami everywhere.

[fragger]

That is a close one. It's exceedingly rare for a rock to pass within the Moon's orbit. I haven't tried to w0#k it out but from somewhere above the top of my head, I would imagine that on the scale of the Solar System that would be like firing a gun at a target a hundred kays away and missing the bullseye by a millimeter, or something crazily similar.

If it lands here sometime in the future, as D_B said it would most likely hit the water. If it hits land, hopefully it would be somewhere sparsely populated. Middle of Western Australia would be alright, there's nothing out there except for maybe a few stray bits of Skylab

[Dweller_Benthos]

If I recall correctly, the equivalent scale is something like shooting a bullet from quite a distance away (100m or so?) and having the bullet pass between the person's head and their earlobe without touching either. As long as they have detached earlobes like most people, though. Another equivalent would be passing the bullet in front of their eye but behind the tips of their eyelashes.

[Art Blade]

that's bloody close.

[PZ]

This planet will be hit one of these days - hopefully not within the time of our tenure here

[mandru]

This situation has a fairly easy fix if the people in leadership blocking numerous other easy fixes would do their damn jobs instead of harnessing the fear of impending peril to maintain their positions of power.

We are already launching payloads the size and weight of full sized school buses into space and we've proven we can hit a moving target by slamming a collider into a comet that was moving far faster than this object.  To me the answer to this kind of reoccurring predictable threat seems obvious.

On another thread here we've discussed how when speed is added to an orbiting object it moves further from the body it is orbiting.  That means the opposite is also true.  Slow it down to bring it closer to the bottom of the gravity well it is pinned to.

I would think that by using existing technology it could easily become a routine task to identify and track these Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).  Once an NEO has been identified as a threat it could become a simple routine matter to send out an interceptor to deploy an expansive self anchoring soft grapple net to basically put a leash leash on it with a large controllable solar sail on the other end of the tether to act as more or less the space age version of a trajectory changing sea anchor*. 

True it may take a few of these solar sails to remove rotation values from the Neo but even those sacrificial encounters would do the job of slowing and thus moving the threat away from Earth by shifting its orbit closer to the Sun.

These tamed NEOs could possibly even be harnessed as targets/opportunities for our first attempts at prospecting, mining, and solar smelting of the asteroids.  Consider the value of building materials that don't require the expense of a launch to get their mass out of the bottom of the Earth's gravity well.

Whenever possible it makes pure good sense to take a stumbling block and reorient our perception of it so that it can be perceived as a highly beneficial stepping stone. 

* Sea Anchor: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anchor

[Dweller_Benthos]

There have been plans to move asteroids in the works for a long time, and getting out to it is pretty well something that can be done. It's finding them in the first place that's the trouble. This one was discovered a couple weeks ago, if I recall the info from the video correctly. That's not enough time to plan a mission and get it out there to nudge it away if it was on a collision course. Even if we had a rocket ready to go, sitting on the launch pad, it wouldn't be enough time to move it enough if it was going to hit. Only thing we could do would be maybe nudge it enough to drop it someplace where it would cause less damage. And this was a small one, a larger one that could be a serious threat would be even more difficult to move out of the way. But moving one to just outside our orbit into something more stable so it could be visited and even mined would be a great achievement.

[Art Blade]

This one was discovered a couple weeks ago, if I recall the info from the video correctly

https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=2018+RC

It was discovered September 3rd, 2018, only three days before I posted this topic and only six days prior to the fly-by.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah I found that later as well, on space.com I think. Even if you had a ship in orbit already, with all it needed to move an asteroid, that still wouldn't be enough time. We're talking needing Star Trek level ships with that time frame, and just blowing it up with phasers.

[Art Blade]