The End of the World

The End of the World 



  After viewing the classic Michael Bay film "Armageddon"; it actually makes you think a lot about what would happen if an unstoppable asteroid was heading straight for our planet and would cause mass extinction at any moment. Despite this film being extremely far fetched and unrealistic the statistics of how this asteroid wofuld impact the planet is actually pretty accurately described in one of the first scenes. It compares the dinosaur extinction to what in the movie was an asteroid the size of Texas and actually states how the dinosaurs became extinct very accurately. To explore how this type of situation would play out, there is many theories NASA has made and what plans we have for something like this and it doesn't seem we have a Bruce Willis and a team of oil drillers to save us. 


    There actually an asteroid with a slight possibility to cross paths with Earth in 2027. This is being used by NASA to prepare a scenario to test a possible plan to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. From an article from Space.com, "And when NASA and European Space Agency systems work on that orbit, both agencies suggest that the space rock could theoretically cross paths with Earth on April 29, 2027 — eight years to the day from the beginning of the conference." (). This is actually pretty alarming to hear even with a small possibility of it hitting us. The test will be conducted as the first planetary-defense mission. The plan is to send an autonomously driven propelled spacecraft called "DART" towards the moon of "Didymos" and collide with it in order to effect the orbital spin of the moon which would then cause the asteroid itself to change its path slightly. The test is more a data collection to study more options. It will apparently collide in October of 2022. 





    This is no where near a definite for whether this can stop a potential threat from ending our future indefinitely. Something like an asteroid in Armageddon which is the size of Texas would be unstoppable I believe. The last asteroid to hit Earth was in 2013 called Chelyabinsk and it was believed to be 20m and whipped out 14 miles of above ground land. ""The asteroid was about 17 meters [56 feet] in diameter and weighed approximately 10,000 metric tons [11,000 tons]," Peter Brown, a physics professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. "It struck Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 mph [64,370 km/h] and broke apart about 12 to 15 miles [19 to 24 km] above Earth's surface. The energy of the resulting explosion exceeded 470 kilotons of TNT." https://www.space.com/33623-chelyabinsk-meteor-wake-up-call-for-earth.html. If we were to calculate the same meteor in Armageddon in which Texas is about 790 miles(1272 km) long and about 770 miles(1239 km) wide, the impact would be astonishing. This meteor is about 46 times the size of Chelyabinsk so the amount of force that would put on this would be insane. The Earth would stand no chance even if you drilled a nuke into it. 




Comments

  1. You did some good research, and I like you including the link to your source article and the video, but the writing had a distracting number of typos and problems, like the text in the 2nd paragraph that is covered with white lines, so that it is impossible to read without highlighting the text. You also make it sound like the exercise that NASA and others conducted was a real prediction for an asteroid impact in 2027.

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