Anyone hear about a possible meteor storm this weekend? Anyway if we're lucky, around the 12th, 13th, and maybe 14th the skies may get lit up. A meteor storm would be lots of shooting stars due to debris from a close encounter with a comet that is passing by nearby. Might be nothing though. Next rumored possible hit is around May 25th. NASA has officially denied that anything major is going to hit the Earth.
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last commentYou should watch out for falling pieces of SKY LAB too!
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I believe most of the public is never going to believe that bigger rocks routinely hit the Earth unless they actually see it first hand. Odds are that it will explode over the ocean and cause a bit of a wave somewhere. I can imagine in California, someone saying "Surf's up Dude!"
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On the bright side to our cosmic shooting gallery, there are trillion dollar asteroids full of gold and heavy metals just waiting to be mined in near Earth orbits just as soon as someone develops the technology to make a fortune mining them. I just hope whoever tries that doesn't crash big fragments back down to Earth.
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There are programs to catalog and track near earth asteroids (or as some call them earth approaching asteroids), but at this point there really isn't anything we could do even if we saw it coming. The good news is that most of the stuff that big or bigger is in fairly stable orbits. The biggest stuff that crosses our orbit has largely been swept up already. Still, as you say it only takes one, and they are out there. All the more reason to increase astrophysics funding!!
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Apparently rocks around 100 to 120 or so feet in diameter could take out a city and not be detected until they were about to hit. I heard one about 100 feet across crossed through our skies back a few years ago. The tv show stated that in celestial terms, it was so close it would be like the Earth getting grazed by a bullet. I've noticed a lot of tv shows lately about meteors and comets. The Earth is bound to get hit by one of these small 100 footers sooner or later. I hope they see it coming with enough time to evacuate people. Odds may not be good though. Life will go on though.
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Well there are a few things going on;
science.nasa.gov
spaceweather.com
This is also the time of the Lyrid metoer showers. The are an annual event, but we are past the peak of them, but we are also experiencing the Aquariads (I think they peaked last week or so).
You probably heard about the first, the Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 passing close by. There should be sufficient debris from that to put on a decent show.
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