Low Flying Rocks

July 22, 2010 7:50 PM

Tom Taylor's Twitter project, Low Flying Rocks, scrapes the NASA Near Earth Object database, and tweets when an object passes within 0.2 AU (30 million kilometres/18.6 million miles) of the Earth - something that apparently happens "a few times a week".

While most of the bodies detected within the parameters pass only within millions of kilometers of Earth, Taylor said it was "incredibly satisfying" to read, on October 7, 2008, "2008 TC3 just passed the Earth at 13km/s, approximately five thousand, nine hundred and eighty km away."

"I haven’t written any code to deal with a collision situation . . . yet."

(NEOs previously: 1, 2, 3)

posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (9 comments total)

Wow, this is the first thing that has ever made me want to join Twitter.
posted by sunnichka at 7:55 PM on July 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

From the NEO database: Asteroid 2010 KQ: Probably a Rocket Body

You know. Probably. I am genuinely amused by the idea that we really don't have much of a clue as to what happened to half the crap we threw off the shuttles.
posted by griphus at 7:57 PM on July 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I forgot to mention that 2008 TC3, which exploded somewhere over Sudan with a blast equivalent to 1.1 – 2.1 kilotons of TNT, was "the first time ever that an object had been observed before it was to hit Earth."
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 8:07 PM on July 22, 2010

griphus,

As your link said, if it's a rocket part, it looks like it was launched in 1975 or earlier. Thus it wouldn't be something from the Shuttle

unless there was a secret Shuttle program around the time Nixon resigned
posted by lukemeister at 8:34 PM on July 22, 2010

Not a surprise at all - have a look at this graphic of just the inner solar system. Here are more for the middle and outer.

As you can see it's no surprise that the Moon looks the way it does, nor that the Earth has thousands of impact craters. Luckily SPACE IS VERY BIG, and so the chances of collisions are small.

There are 10s of thousands of man-made objects in near-earth orbit, but it wasn't until February 2009 that two of them big enough to be seen collided.
posted by Twang at 12:05 AM on July 23, 2010

I am genuinely amused by the idea that we really don't have much of a clue as to what happened to half the crap we threw off the shuttles.

I think the people involved would be thrilled to know the locations of as much as half of what we've tossed or lost up there.

It's a hard problem for anything other than an active (i.e. transmitting and under your control) satellite. And even for those, it might not be transmitting to you (i.e. it belongs to a foreign nation). It's not like you get nice glossy color photos of the object and can read the serial numbers off. You have to see it a bunch of times and make an orbit (knowing somehow that all those times it was the same object), then project that orbit back in time to connect it with a known orbit or launch (hoping that you actually can project this orbit back that far).
posted by DU at 4:47 AM on July 23, 2010

Could be worse. Consider the situation on Mars with Phobos, Diemos, and Bottomos.
posted by Herodios at 6:33 AM on July 23, 2010

In cosmic terms, huge asteroids have come close to colliding with earth before (4581 Asclepius in 1989, 69230 Hermes in 1937), but even then, no asteroid has come closer than the orbital radius of the moon.
posted by jonp72 at 11:57 AM on July 23, 2010

I like that every tweet on Low Flying Rocks is good news.

As you can see it's no surprise that the Moon looks the way it does, nor that the Earth has thousands of impact craters. Luckily SPACE IS VERY BIG, and so the chances of collisions are small.

Space is big, but time is long.

And even though there were a lot more flying rocks crashing into things in the early days of our solar system, the risk of something crashing into our planet isn't abstract, and it isn't just historical. In the past 15 years we've seen our neighbor Jupiter get hit three times! And even the smallest of those impacts created a disturbance in Jupiter's clouds that was bigger than North America.
posted by jjwiseman at 1:10 PM on July 23, 2010