Mars may get hit by a comet in 2014
March 4, 2013
(Credit: Image credit: Mars: NASA/JPL/MSSS; Comet Halley: Hale Observatory; composite: Phil Plait)
A comet called C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is expected to miss Mars around Oct. 19, 2014 by 37,000 km (23,000 miles), says Bad Astronomy Slate blogger Phil Plait.
Assuming it does hit, while the nucleus size is not well known, it may be as small as 15 kilometers (9 miles) or as big as 50 km (30 miles). Even using the small number means Mars would be slammed by an unimaginable impact. The comet will be moving at a speed of about 55 kilometers per second (120,000 miles per hour!) upon impact, he says.
Doing a rough calculation, Plait gets an explosive yield of roughly one billion megatons: That’s a million billion tons of TNT exploding. Or, if you prefer, an explosion about 25 million times larger than the largest nuclear weapon ever tested on Earth.
UPDATE Mar. 6, 2013 — wording improved.
Orbital diagram for the comet. The inner planets are labeled, and the comet’s path is in blue (dark blue for when it’s below the solar system’s average plane, and light blue above). This shows the comet’s position a few days before it passes Mars. (Credit: NASA/JPL_
Comments (41)
by J.D.
Mars Rover Mars Rover can Sliding Spring come over?
by Brenda
It is true that a comet missing Mars by 37,000 km, while impacting Mars at the same time, is funny – for sure, but your comments are a gas – “..How does miscellaneous debris whizzing around the solar system and randomly hitting things, give you a sense of design?”…. “…a playground next to a garbage dump…” Hilarious! But consider this.
If you leave a bunch of kids in a playground long enough, you will have a garbage dump. I think it’s more like -God made the universe – leaving no mess to clean up, because you can’t get cleaner than He is, but some of His kids in the distant past, who were highly advanced, let wickedness carry them away until it was to prevalent and predominant, that the only thing He could do was ‘wipe the slate clean’. Thus, cataclysms bigger than we can imagine, were sent to destroy the evil and allow for a new beginning. What we see in the asteroid belt and on Mars, are remains of what was once beautiful places, but which because of their accumulation of evil, had to be destroyed. As for the winged satellites that litter the far reaches of our atmosphere, well we’re the ‘children’ who made that playground a garbage dump.
by mlc
God is personal and loving and benevolent. He created man with free will and we have chosen, in our free will, to reject Him and His loving ways. In His foreknowledge He allowed sin and its consequences so that when He sent His Son to bear the penalty of sin we would have an opportunity to see the extent to which our Holy, Loving, Creator God would go to show His great love for us. We could not ourselves bear this penalty because to pay for sins debt there had to be One who is sinless to pay the penalty.
But I digress…
“I said you are a “newb”, not a “noob”. There is no reason to get angry. But since you are a newb you probably don’t understand the difference… yet.”
by asiwel
Lots of commentary on this one … further follow-up might be in order. A Mars impact like this would likely have some real downsides. Think about how all those discovered Mars meteorites got sent to Earth in the first place. This sure would mess up the clean space for satellites in Mars orbit. That kind of disturbance in our close neighborhood would give one pause.
by John Z
This morning I got hit by a commuter train that missed me by 25 feet.
by Editor
Was that a near-miss or a near-hit? :)
by John Z
:)
by JasonN
So are you, dear Editor, planning to fix the article?
by Editor
Done. Whoever wrote that should be fired … wait, that was me….
by Bri
Now give yourself a bonus for the fine job you did cleaning up that mess!
by Street
You’re an editor! You should write “…that was I”, not “that was me”. You wouldn’t say “Me was the person who wrote…”, You would say “I was the person…”
by Editor
Me write bad.
by Carl
If it does hit, and it has a 15 kilometer core of solid ice, a quick calculation says it has some 42,4 trillion tons of water on board. Correct me if I’m wrong.
What will happen to Mars atmosphere? Will future colonies have an easier time to find water?
by ABR
So if the comet misses the passing Mars by a close enough margin would the gravitational force of Mars be enough to pull the comet onto a collision course with earth?
by George
Actually for the sake of Mars terraforming we should do everything possible to meake sure that the comet would hit Mars – it contains a lot of water…
by GatorALLin
….this article just reminds me that when you see good pics of Mars or even our moon where there is a plethora of big and small craters that show just how many hits they have taken over the last few billion years.
Amazing how many near misses we may have had in the past…and still in the future that could be the tipping point for our own evolution or existence. Makes you feel so small/insignificant to know how lucky we are to have life on this planet… or how lucky we were to have the big rock hit Earth 65 million years ago (without that strike, would Earth be overrun with dinosaurs instead of humans today?) If you calculate the last 5 mass extinctions on Earth they happen on average ever 92 million years. So at first glance we have 27 million years still to go… until you look at the big/little cycle and realize we should be on the short cycle (not the big one or not the average) and then maybe we are overdue for a mass extinction (if you believe in cycles). Anyone can play the what if game and so who knows….? All just more fuel for advancing science and study of our Universe and to get off the rock and spread our eggs out a bit from just this Earth basket…. If the singularity is coming maybe a few hundred more years is all we need to get things figured out… lets hope so anyhow… Cheers!
by Simon
This is terrible copy-pasting, distorting the message of the original article (leading to great sentences like “will get hit by a comet missing the planet”) and having text refer to other text that wasn’t copied (“more on that in a second”). Terrible. I’ll probably just be clicking the links to the original articles from now on.
by Rob Fleming
So maybe the universe is still a “work in progress” and the comet is water ice coming to refill all the Mars water coolers.
by Visitor
The primary function of the human mind is to see patterns in data. To imagine “design” in the extremely random and entirely unrelated events you’re talking about (do you have any idea of the distance and scale proportions involved here?) is to let imagination trump evidence. Which is to say: to ignore the larger context of what you’re observing in order to satisfy your imaginary premise.
by Visitor
Comment threading on this blog is very poor. This was in response to @Khannea below.
by Sea bass
Meh, imagination is more important than knowledge (quote Einstein). It also trumps evidence in a sense of predicting what hasn’t been proven or tested yet. Whereas evidence relies on the past, imagination thrives on the future.
by Cliff O'Hearne
One could design a computer game around this: Interceptor Missiles vs. Incoming Comets.
by Dr. Richard
Mars will get hit, but the comet will miss!!?? I stopped there. I hate stupid articles!
by Pathman
If the designer was a she, then she probably would have cleaned up. That tells you the designer was a he and left it a mess.
by Publius
Who the heck wrote the first sentence; “Mars may get hit by a comet called C/2013 A1. . .missing the planet by 37,000 km (23,000 miles),” What is that supposed to mean? Is this blog being written by a computer program that attempts to generate meaningful summaries of articles in other publications? If not, maybe it should be. . .
by Jod
srsly lmao i was trippin over that
by GatorALLin
I read the other article and this part (I posted below) helped me understand more of the details on why it may change over time and actually hit it, when they also say it was still 23,000 miles away….
right now, the comet is over a billion kilometers from the Sun, and is (pardon the expression) stone cold. Still, a small amount of coma activity has been seen (see the picture below), and as it gets closer over the next year or so, it may very well vent more gas. If it does, its orbit may change enough to push it farther from Mars. Or it may push it right into the planet’s path. We won’t know for sure until at least late summer 2013, when more observations are possible (it’s about to get too close to the Sun from our viewpoint here on Earth to observe).
Let me be very clear: We are in no danger here on Earth. The nudges in orbit I’m talking about are pretty small, and it will be many millions of kilometers from Earth at closest. We’re safe, but Mars is not….
by Dr. Richard
Thanks! I like your read. This makes sense, the parabola seen in the diagram indicates a close miss.
by Jim
Today’s post says “Wording improved,” but it still says “will miss” then describes only the effect of the impact. This is science??
by Editor
This is a short excerpt of an article on the Bad Astronomy blog. I suggest reading that (linked) for a more complete story. I added “Assuming it does hit” to further clarify.
by Robyn
If there is an impact, even remotely approaching the scale being discussed, that would appear to be the end of the Opportunity rover program. Global winter would very quickly eliminate the sunlight the rover uses for power and temperature drop would quickly kill the batteries and other onboard electronics.
It seems possible that the Curiosity rover might survive. If so, it could give us hard data on what the effects of a world wide climate catastrophe through impact or nuclear war or atmospheric pollution would look like.
Maybe, enough tor convince us to act.
by Dwight
On the off-chance that it hits, however, we’ll have an unprecedented research opportunity, though. If it destroys the rover missions, see be it. It would be our first observed large scale impact.
by Rob Fleming
This raises a bunch of second-order questions. Where is the comet going to hit relative to earth? Front side? Back side? If the leading edge, which way is Mars rotating? I’m thinking that there will be a lot of debris thrown up, some reaching escape velocity and all subject to the rotational momentum so that it will be flung toward or away from earth orbit. Somebody who took physics less than 48 years ago can probably state this better.
by Khannea Suntzu
There seems to be design to the universe … first Jupiter with the Schoemaker-Levy impact, and last month the Russia atmospheric detonation. If Mars gets impacted this sounds like an urgent warning call …
“human species, become rational, technologically and scientific active, or ‘we’ Euthanize you.”
The next impact would be directed towards Earth. Either we deal with it, or we as a species aren’t worth the misery of continued existence.
by Joe Prete
Yes.
by Publius
How does miscellaneous debris whizzing around the solar system and randomly hiting things give you a sense of design? A designer would have cleaned up the workshop after she finished building the stars and planets.
by Dr. Richard
I doubt that rocks flying around in space near our planet have anything to do with a message from anyone. Your fiat on Tecnologicaly and scientificly active is already the case. We are curious, we make things, we do our best to deal with the irrational among us. If that isn’t good enough, “The parents in the sky”, need to be a little more informative, about what their requirements are. My guess is, we are on our own.
by Dav3000
Unless “Our Parents in the sky” (OPITS) have a sense of humor (as would be evidenced
by putting the a playground next to the garbage dump), or just to give us something interesting to do.
by pt
What about mass human suffering is amusing? If there are designers, they are powerless, foolish, and compassionless enough to not waste time worshipping. Agreed with Dr. Richard, though there may be highly advanced benevolent life, there’s no grand designer that’s worth the mental and physical resources we devote towards one…any deity that designs a species capable of human-created atrocities as their chosen children is one that should be ignored at all costs. That said, I sure hope that a large impact on another planet would be a wake-up call to us that the development of our lagging space technology is critical to our survival and prosperity.
by Ian
Quite right. Like I’ve always said, if there is a God…. she’s one sick puppy. ;)
by A4i
Someone’s understanding of Nature differs from someone’s feelings about the Nature. Lack of understanding and lots of feelings is the base assumption for Humans.