Thousands of Asteroids near Earth.Today!

Originally posted by Illustronic
They are not all around earth now and may never get within a lunar distance, one of the many additional 'cyber shock impact' threads by a member that authors one at least once a week.

That is all I have to say about the thread title, the rest is speculation out of my major field of study.

That is correct in part. There are not known to be thousands of asteroids 'around Earth' specifically. On the other hand there are probably millions of asteroids in total and possibly a million larger than 1km, and the biggest ones of interest like Vesta show impacts, most likely from smaller asteroids and so it goes on in the inner solar system. Vesta and Ceres are now classed as dwarf planets since the 'purge' of 2006. There is no point in contesting the rights and wrongs of a post like this where the info within has some basis in known accumulated knowledge, and where that accumulated knowledge is itself incomplete. The OP may have scared himself more than anybody else with the old info, but he/she needs to look to the sites that deal with the stuff that is known, this is one example,

neo.jpl.nasa.gov...

You can run this until you have been dead at least twice, run it any longer and you will be dead from 'Watching drying paint' syndrome.

Originally posted by CosmicCitizen
I saw a meteor hit in a field about 200 meters from the house late last night. It was pretty cool - it burst into blue sparks just before it hit the ground. I will go look for it later today.

edit on 8-12-2011 by CosmicCitizen because: (no reason given)

Find the pieces of it, if you can. If it's an iron meteor, use a metal detector if you can get your hands on one. If it's a chondrite meteor, lots of luck, because it won't look like anything but a bunch of rocks. Takes an expert to find those. But seriously, if you can find pieces they can be worth a LOT of money. Even small pieces can be worth hundreds of $$.

As for this finding, this is about what they expected to find, except that there's actually less near Earth asteroids out there then they had originally estimated they would find. That's fine, that's actually good for us because that means less of a chance one will hit us. The whole purpose of this study was to find these objects and track them so that if one were on course to hit us we'd have enough early warning to do something about it -- to actually nudge it into a safer orbit so it misses us. We might have to do this with Apophis, but we won't know until it makes it's next very close approach to the Earth. After that we'll know if our orbit has affected the thing in just such a way that it could strike us its next go round after that. If it will, we have ways of dealing with it, we just need to make sure the politicians realize it's a real threat and let the space agencies do what they have to do.

reply to post by smurfy

Vesta isn't yet classified as a dwarf planet, but it may yet be in the future. It's not a perfect sphere, but it's imperfections may have more to do with impacts rather than having mass enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium. Depending on what is determined about this, it could well eventually be given dwarf planet status.