Earth and Near Earth Objects...:-)

Thought I'd share this link just before new year which is a 2d illustration of NEO's around Earth, mars, Venus and Mercury...

szyzyg.arm.ac.uk...

There's ALOT 'floating around' out there ....

Happy new year

PDUK

reply to post by PurpleDog UK


Boy, there sure is a lot of stuff out there floating and moving around. Funny we don't have more stuff crashing into us.

reply to post by rickymouse


That's why pictures of this kind bug me. They create a false (and alarming) impression.

At the scale of this picture, one pixel equals ~430,000 miles, or over 4 times the diameter of Jupiter and nearly the diameter of our Moon's orbit. Each asteroid symbol is three pixels across, or ~1,300,000 miles - larger than the Sun. No wonder it looks crowded!

If you scaled it properly in this picture, a 1km asteroid would be roughly the size of a single water molecule.

reply to post by Saint Exupery

Thanks for putting things into perspective. Space is very big, and very empty.

Speaking of impacts by large bodies, I think the vast majority of what could have impacted Earth already has. Billions of years have created a fairly stable arrangement of orbits (such as the main asteroid belt), so most of impacts we will face will come from asteroid collisions producing new chunks of rock on slightly different orbits, or from comets.

I also remember hearing that the vast majority of large (over 1 km) NEOs have been found and accounted for. I wouldn't want a 50-meter asteroid landing where I live, but at least it wouldn't be an extinction-level event like from a 10-km asteroid.