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On being able to locate all these small object (some smaller than a small house), imagine this:
eriktheawful
On being able to locate all these small object (some smaller than a small house), imagine this:
I've just put you out in the middle of a huge dried up salt flat lake out in the western part of the US.
I give you a pair of binoculars.
Now, up to 1 mile away or more, I'm going to take a thousand pennies, along with a few hundred golf balls, and some baseballs, and spread them out......let's say you are facing north......I'm going to spread them out from the east to 180 degrees out to the west, all 1 mile away or more.......
Now find them. All of them, using those binoculars I gave you.
Worse, I'm going to make sure they are all light colored like the salt flat (just like darker colored asteroids and the blackness of space......that do not reflect light very well.
And I'm going to make them move around. They may move towards you......away from you.....or different directions all together.
At certain times, I'm going to have a blinding light shinning directly at you (the sun).
Getting the idea of how hard it is to locate all these objects now?
Let's make it even MORE real. Let us put all these small object in a 360 degree sphere around you 1 mile out and further............you have a LOT more sky to be looking at now. Above you, below you, away from you......
Now let's be smart about it and start taking pictures of the sky, and then do the same some hours (or days) later, so we can compare the pictures and see if anything is moving (IE the "Blink" method).
Ah, but did I tell you how much area of the sky that just 2 of those pictures are going to be covering? It will be fractions of a degree......and you have how many degrees of sky to cover? How many hours of night to take as many pictures as you can (and remember......you have to take pictures of the exact same area again either hours or days later to capture this movement).
Now you're going to need people and computers to analyze all those pictures.....then if you DO find something in those pictures......You're going to have to go back and look again, and see if you can spot your object, yet again.....and yes....take even more pictures.
Why? Why so you can calculate it's orbit. THEN you'll know if it might be a possible threat to our planet.
Can anyone see what an overwhelming task this is? It's why amature astronomers are so important. You have a LOT of people looking up in the sky, than just one government run space agency, or a handful of universities.
BUT......not all those amatures have as much powerful equipment to see a asteroid only 10 feet in diameter located 50 million miles away.
It's really amusing to see how many people seem to expect NASA to be able to see all of the sky at once, and be able to track everything, so small, and so far away all at once.......
SadistNocturne
Werner Von Braun said...
First Communism, then Terrorism, then Rogue States, then Asteroids, then Aliens.
Interesting.
There you have it.
Facts,
Scary facts,
We (humanity) are existing and living on a celestial dartboard.
And there is bugger all we can do about it - yet.
cheesy
reply to post by 727Sky
WOW Sory sir I i dont know about this before..Thats Great! please tell me what else! Tq Mr.727Sky! love you!
727Sky
cheesy
reply to post by 727Sky
WOW Sory sir I i dont know about this before..Thats Great! please tell me what else! Tq Mr.727Sky! love you!
Hey Cheesy glad you saw the thread!! But in less you are some hot Indonesian Chick please don't talk about loving me in front of the Klingons err members. A hand shake will suffice.... hahahahahedit on 10-10-2013 by 727Sky because: ..
It's really amusing to see how many people seem to expect NASA to be able to see all of the sky at once, and be able to track everything, so small, and so far away all at once...
When an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February, shattering windows for miles and injuring well over 1,000 people, experts said it was a rare event — of a magnitude that might occur only once every 100 to 200 years, on average. But now a team of scientists is suggesting that the Earth is vulnerable to many more Chelyabinsk-size space rocks than was previously thought. In research being published Wednesday by the journal Nature, they estimate that such strikes could occur as often as every decade or two.
A United Nations committee has been studying the issue for some time, and next month the General Assembly is expected to adopt two of its recommendations: establishing an International Asteroid Warning Network for countries to share information; and calling on the world’s space agencies to set up an advisory group to explore technologies for deflecting an asteroid.