73p/schwassmann-wachmann 3, page 3

You know what guys....chill a little!!

One of the main rules of these posting boards is to respect one another. There is no need for name calling or personal attacks. Let's keep it to the facts. Even conjecture based on evidence is encouraged here.

So far facts have been presented and so has conjecture.

The conjecture is that around May 24th, there may be a fireball sized object that could penetrate the earth's atmosphere and cause something to happen. If anything at all happens, it would most likely just be an eye opener.

The facts are that....

1. This 2006 GY2 asteroid is going to PASS the earth at a distance of about 1.65 million miles. That's close, but nothing to worry about this year.

2. The comet fragments in the lead are going to PASS us at a distance of about 6-8 million miles. The trailing fragments get smaller as they are further from the lead fragments. The KNOWN trailing fragments will PASS us at 4-6 million miles.

3. There are undoubtedly thousands of fragments from this comet at this time. Most of these fragments are too small to see. Some of them will be visible to high powered telescopes in Mid-May as they PASS.

4. We have no idea how far the smaller fragments have scattered. We do know the direction that they are scattering. They are scattering in the general direction of "behind the trajectory of the former main comet" very much like a meteorite disintegrates in the atmosphere of the earth leaving behind it a trail of debris. That debris continues to move in the same general direction as he head, but the atmosphere slows it.

5. If the debris trail of this comet is long enough and scattered right, then we could see a good meteor shower, perhaps even a few fireballs scattered around the globe and a slim possibility that a very small fragment could survive to impact somewhere on the globe. The probability of such a fragment causing newsworthy damage is very very very small. So small that I am not concerned about it. However, I will be out watching the skies on May 23-26 looking and hoping for a cool fireball. Very few people get a chance to witness a fireball in their life and this is an opportunity.

On another note, I was reading the arguement here about the probabilities of being killed by a meteor. Some of those stats are old. Just this year, a group of astronomers got together and calculated the probability of a person being killed by a meteor and they came out with about a 1 in 6,000 chance....more likely than dying in a plane crash but far less than most other forms of death. Still the probability is higher than most of us realize. For more info on that, you can read a book called "Rain of Iron and Ice" by John Lewis, a current astronomy professor at the University of Arizona.

On those stats, they are base on life of 60-70 years and the fact that populations are much greater today than they ever have been before.