The asteroid and the keyhole

Contains simulations of oceanic impacts. 2004 Tsunami all over again or worse. Florida would be hit far worse by a gulf impact than CA by a pacific one.

Will Earth break up 2004 MN4?

"The results shocked some astronomers. The new orbit indicates the asteroid will miss Earth by 22,000 miles (35,400 km), passing just inside the belt of geostationary satellites.

A miss is still a miss, so what's the big deal? At first glance, the change in the miss distance doesn't seem surprising. Astronomers are constantly updating comet and asteroid orbits, and changes are expected.

But for 2004 MN4, the change in the miss distance was greater than the error computed in the December analyses. Put another way, 2004 MN4 is now outside the uncertainty box — the region astronomers thought would contain the object's most likely locations on April 13, 2029.

The asteroid, whose chance of striking Earth was once computed to be improbably high, has presented us with the improbable once again. Scientists place great store in their error estimates — sometimes too much. One of the most prominent asteroid researchers, Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado, notes that who deal with low-probability, high-consequence events, like airplane crashes, place very little faith in error estimates. Perhaps, he suggests, this is a lesson the asteroid community needs to learn.

But there's another reason for concern. According to Dan Durda, another SWRI astronomer, 2004 MN4 is likely to be a "rubble-pile" asteroid, consisting of material only loosely held together by gravity. Because the asteroid will pass us at just 2.5 times Earth's diameter, tidal forces could tear it apart. The result would be a trail of rocks drifting slowly apart with the passage of time. One or more of these might hit Earth in the more distant future, creating a spectacular fireball as it burns up in the atmosphere."

Regards,
Mark