Comments on: Mars may get hit by a comet in 2014

By: Editor

Editor — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:31:49 +0000

Me write bad.

By: Street

Street — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:11:55 +0000

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: J.D.

J.D. — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 21:20:03 +0000

Mars Rover Mars Rover can Sliding Spring come over?

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:54:46 +0000

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: Brenda

Brenda — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:19:44 +0000

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: Jim

Jim — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:28:25 +0000

Today’s post says “Wording improved,” but it still says “will miss” then describes only the effect of the impact. This is science??

By: mlc

mlc — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:22:13 +0000

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

asiwel — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:05:06 +0000

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: Bri

Bri — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:44:08 +0000

Now give yourself a bonus for the fine job you did cleaning up that mess!

By: Editor

Editor — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:24:13 +0000

Done. Whoever wrote that should be fired … wait, that was me….

By: JasonN

JasonN — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:32:53 +0000

So are you, dear Editor, planning to fix the article?

By: John Z

John Z — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:27:56 +0000

By: Editor

Editor — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:18:59 +0000

Was that a near-miss or a near-hit? :)

By: John Z

John Z — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:17:01 +0000

This morning I got hit by a commuter train that missed me by 25 feet.

By: A4i

A4i — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:20:03 +0000

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.

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:39:40 +0000

Quite right. Like I’ve always said, if there is a God…. she’s one sick puppy. ;)

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:04:15 +0000

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

ABR — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:53:17 +0000

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

George — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:50:22 +0000

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: Sea bass

Sea bass — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 03:40:34 +0000

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: pt

pt — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 03:24:49 +0000

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: Dwight

Dwight — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:40:52 +0000

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: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:11:52 +0000

….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

Simon — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:01:54 +0000

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

Rob Fleming — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:53:56 +0000

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: Dav3000

Dav3000 — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:08:59 +0000

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: Visitor

Visitor — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:50:34 +0000

Comment threading on this blog is very poor. This was in response to @Khannea below.

By: Visitor

Visitor — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:49:24 +0000

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: Dr. Richard

Dr. Richard — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:40:11 +0000

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: Cliff O'Hearne

Cliff O'Hearne — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:39:30 +0000

One could design a computer game around this: Interceptor Missiles vs. Incoming Comets.

By: Dr. Richard

Dr. Richard — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:33:55 +0000

Thanks! I like your read. This makes sense, the parabola seen in the diagram indicates a close miss.

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:20:58 +0000

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

Dr. Richard — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:11:29 +0000

Mars will get hit, but the comet will miss!!?? I stopped there. I hate stupid articles!

By: Jod

Jod — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:43:11 +0000

srsly lmao i was trippin over that

By: Pathman

Pathman — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:59:11 +0000

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

Publius — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:47:40 +0000

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: Publius

Publius — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:45:46 +0000

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: Robyn

Robyn — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:45:44 +0000

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: Rob Fleming

Rob Fleming — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:05:14 +0000

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: Joe Prete

Joe Prete — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:48:06 +0000

Yes.

By: Khannea Suntzu

Khannea Suntzu — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:36:12 +0000

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.