How fast 2005 yu55

People often forget this. BUT there is a way out — we could make huge inflatable cushions similar to the ones used in MER rovers but much bigger.

Atmospheric heating is nonexistent on asteroids. Inserting the probe exactly in the path of small asteroid might be a problem…. This is a collision at 46, Do you think you could create big enough air bags that could cushion the impact? Thanks for the numbers! Imagine technology withstanding g, which is a realistic figure as I understand. And that means you need 2. So the breaking path is 17 km? There has to be a way how to get a free ride! Since you would be wearing a spacesuit I presume the molecules would be confinged to the suit.

Image link. Olaf, space has no friction. Sci-fi shows seem to have everyone brainwashed to forget this factor. This is why we have calculus…. Converting your observations to standard magnitudes might seem daunting, but an overview of the process and a spreadsheet can be found by clicking here. If you would like to participate in the photmetry campaign, please contact Brian Warner. Everyone who contributes useful data will be credited in any research paper s that result.

This web page will be updated daily as new data become available. Observers can, of course, also do their own analysis and report results independently. Pointing accuracy will need to be on the order of 1 arc minute.

To test the abilty to track the asteroid, team member Mikael Granvik found an earth-orbiting satellite whose motion would be close to that of the asteroid. This picture shows one of the images that captured the satellite.

Warner used MPO Canopus to measure the end points of the satellite trails. Since the ephemeris from Granvik gave positions "Of Date" current epoch, not J , the positions were converted to J Oct22 before being sent to the team. About a half-dozen observers have expressed interest in taking part in the YU55 campaign. All are from the United States. It would be great to have some observers from other parts of the world join in. Since there is a possibility the period of YU55 is near 18 hours, it will help tremdously to have those additional observers.

In the meantime, interest in the flyby is growing. Queries have come in from Nature, Space. Leonard David wrote to get some quotes on the flyby. A couple more observers have expressed interest in the photometry campaign, bringing the total to 8. Like two ships passing in the night, they'll miss each other by more than , miles , km. But, out of curiosity, what if YU55 were on a collision course with the moon?

Is it big enough to do major damage? That's significant, but still a pretty small crater in terms of the hierarchy of lunar craters. For comparison, the moon's biggest impact crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, measures 1, miles 2, km in diameter.

There have been some rude surprises in between, but not involving anything remotely as large. Yeomans and his colleagues have spent years looking for and tracking so-called NEOs, to figure out whether there's a danger that any of them might hit us in the foreseeable future. Asteroids like this one likely crashed into the young Earth almost routinely billions of years ago, carrying organic, carbon-based materials, and making life possible. But an impact in modern times could be catastrophic.

There have been a few times -- most notably 65 million years ago, at the end of the age of dinosaurs -- when impacts from space wiped out much of the life on Earth. Ray Williamson, head of an organization called the Secure World Foundation, said he hopes YU55 will serve as a healthy alert that the nations of the world need to get together and decide what to do if some future asteroid appears to be coming too close for comfort. All sorts of schemes have been proposed for deflecting asteroids -- everything from blowing them apart with nuclear weapons to deflecting them gently with advanced rocket engines.