Near-miss asteroid could have wiped out Greater London.
By Charles Arthur
The Independent, UK - 30 September, 2004.
AN ASTEROID measuring nearly three miles across squeezed past Earth by the astronomical equivalent of a hair's breadth yesterday.
| "Had Toutatis hit the Earth, it would have had the explosive impact of a one million megaton bomb, many times the nuclear arsenal of the superpowers, and destroyed all life on the planet." |
The flypast, by the asteroid Toutatis, was the closest it will make this century, and one of the nearest by any "near-Earth object" for the next 180 years.
But astronomers warned there are potentially thousands of much smaller objects that could devastate an area as large as the M25 region which are not being picked up because governments are failing to fund the detection of one of the greatest threats to the planet.
Had Toutatis hit the Earth, it would have had the explosive impact of a one million megaton bomb, many times the nuclear arsenal of the superpowers, and destroyed all life on the planet. But its closeness is relative - it remained a little less than a million miles away.
But even smaller objects, as small as 100 to 200 metres across, could wipe out an area the size of London, warned Kevin Yates of the Near-Earth Objects group at the British National Space Centre. "Nasa has calculated that such an object will hit the Earth about once every 700 to 1,000 years," he said yesterday. "Such an object did hit the Earth in 1908, over Tunguska in Siberia, which devastated two thousand square kilometres of forest."
Toutatis posed little risk.
The peculiar-shaped asteroid - described by one astronomer as looking like a "cosmic yam" - whizzed past at roughly four times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, precisely as astronomers had expected.
"Toutatis isn't any risk to the Earth," said Dr Yates. "It has an extremely well-known orbit, and has been observed with radio telescopes, which gives a pretty accurate prediction of where it's going."
Named after an obscure Celtic and Gallic god - whose name then appeared in the Asterix cartoon as an expletive - the asteroid measures 2.9 miles by 1.4 miles by 1.2 miles. Its next close approach to the Earth will not come before 2100. The next close approach to the Earth by an identified near-Earth object will be on 26 January 2015 - when an object called 2004 BL86, discovered only this year, will pass just 800,000 miles from the Earth.
KEY POINTS & SOLUTIONS:
- Why take unnecessary risks? It is just common sense to make sure that we at least have an appropriate defense system and plan in place should it become necessary to use it.
Scientists have mapped many asteroid and meteor trajectories but their calculations can not take into account all possible circumstances, like a major asteroid having its path altered due to some unforeseen interstellar phenomenon. This being the case, there is certainly 'no guarantee' that the Earth is safe.
So why take unnecessary risks? Eventually the odds inevitably turn against you, just as the Asian tsunami demonstrated on December 26th, 2004 in which upwards of 300,000 people lost their lives. This was an event that was also deemed 'unlikely' to occur and so an appropriate warning system was never put in place.