Election Day Asteroid

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A very, very, very small asteroid named 2018VP1 is estimated to only be about 7 feet in length. But an asteroid screaming toward Earth has a minuscule chance of impact hours before the election between Trump and Biden. Even if it did manage to impact the Earth, all or most of it would burn up in the atmosphere. SO IT IS A NON-THREAT.

Less than two weeks ago, on Aug. 15, an asteroid the size of an automobile missed the Earth by about 1,800 miles. Not only was it completely undetected, but it was the closest call we have ever had without being impacted.

What's the big deal?

Well, according to NASA, there are about 25,000 of these near-Earth asteroids from 6 to 460 feet wide. With only 8,000 of them detected. Worse, NASA believes there are tens of millions of these 33 to 65 feet in diameter asteroids zooming around undiscovered within 30 million miles of Earth.

To put it into terms everyone could understand, last year NASA simulated a 200-foot asteroid slamming into New York City. Their study concluded it would have hit New York with 1,000 times the destructive force of the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima in World War II and instantly killed upwards of 1.3 million people.

That’s the “big deal.”

For a real-life example of the destructive force from a “small” asteroid, we only have to look at what happened to Siberia on June 30, 1908, when an asteroid less than 150 feet across exploded in the air. It leveled more than 80 million trees and laid waste to an area roughly twice the size of New York City.

Last year in a major study – mostly ignored by our leaders – from Johns Hopkins titled: “Breaking up is hard to do. Asteroids are stronger, harder to destroy than previously thought,” the scientists warned, “It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat.”

All of which begs the question: What are our realistic responses to this major threat?

NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee is now rightfully shifting much of its attention to asteroid detection and deflection. Next year, it will launch the “Double Asteroid Redirection Test” (DART). The goal of this planetary defense mission is to collide with a tiny moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid “Didymos” to test a technique to deflect its orbit.

That's better than nothing but any real defense of our planet is still years to decades away and everyone at NASA and within our government knows that.

Source: 'Election Day' asteroid – not a political omen, but it is a warning

So you are saying my vote for a giant asteroid was not wasted. . Sorry couldn't help myself. All joking aside I do wonder if a beefed current version of Star Wars could deter the threat. Currently it is only in the Pacific I believe.

And we are really, really bad at spotting ones that approach from within Earth's orbit, like the Chelyabinsk meteor. We could badly do with a network of early-warning space probes, including some in orbits closer to the sun than us.

Just stumbled across a mention of the "Ch'ing-yang event", a probable asteroid air-burst in 1490 that killed thousands.

A miss is as good as a mile -- or in this case, a light-year.

An asteroid with a diameter the size of a refrigerator could strike the Earth the day before the November election, according to celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson — but it’s not large enough to do any serious damage. The famed astrophysicist said the space rock, known as 2018VP1, is hurtling towards Earth at a speed of 25,000 miles per hour and may clip the planet on Nov. 2. “It currently has a 0.41% chance of entering our planet’s atmosphere, but if it did, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size,” the space agency said.



Source: Asteroid could strike Earth day prior to election: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Horace Greely accidently "created" a crime wave in NYC simply by reporting every crime reported to the police. Before that the newspapers only reported a few newsworthy crimes. By doing that Greely plunged the city into scandal, and got politicians fired and police chiefs fired, etc. as the public went into panic . Even though his paper was just reporting the normal stuff that had been happening all of the time.

Here you're doing the same thing. Earth gets hits and near misses from a constant rain of small asteroids. And you're being like a sleazy tabloid and just hyping up each one as if it were first page news, and making it look like we are all suddenlyonly now in more danger than usual. When in fact you're just making us aware of something that goes on all of the time.

But in the long run we ARE endangered by natural cosmic shrapnel flying around, and could use some kind of early warning system. Satellites to detect deadly projectiles coming at us, and maybe other satellites to shoot nukes at the threatening asteroids.

'ELECTION DAY ASTEROID' MISSES EARTH: Asteroid 2018 VP1 approached Earth on Nov. 2nd ... and missed. The 3-meter wide space rock had a 1 in 240 (0.41%) chance of hitting our planet on the eve of US Election Day, but no fireballs or impact-infrasounds were detected. Break out the Oreos and let the election begin!

Source: spaceweather.com of 3 November 2020

Another "Doomsday" asteroid missed Earth?

Gee ... I didn't notice ...

Will Jupiter save us this time too?