PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet DIGEST 6 July 1998
------------------------
(1) KLET OBSERVATORY NEO PROGRAMME
Jana Ticha <klet@klet.cz>
wrote:
(2) CLOSE APPROACHES BETWEEN ASTEROIDS AND PLANETS
Sormano Astronomical Observatory <sormano@tin.it>
(3) GARETH WILLIAMS ON 1998 DK36
Sky Reporter <njsurf.com/skyviews>
(4) ARMAGEDDON BLASTS SCIENCE
ABCNEWS.com
(5) SCIENCE FICTION WITHOUT THE SCIENCE:
COMPARED TO ARMAGGEDON, DEEP IMPACT LOOKS LIKE
A PHD THESIS
Steven Excell <excell@cris.com>
(6) OPEN LETTER TO STEVEN SPIELBERG:
Ed Grondine <epgrondine@hotmail.com>
======================
(1) KLET OBSERVATORY NEO PROGRAMME
From Jana Ticha <klet@klet.cz>
wrote:
Dear Benny Peiser,
I am always interested in information about NEO research and its
public
context presented on CC Digest.
I think that it might be useful for members of the CCNet to read
also
about NEO activities in small countries (whose economic
circumstances
are not very good for basic research), to fill a lack of
information
about European NEO efforts (as suggested by our ODAS' colleagues)
and
moreover to read something not only about discoveries, but also
about
the necessary follow-up astrometry of NEOs. Therefore you can
kindly
find short information about our work at Klet Observatory below.
Best regards
Jana Ticha
*****************************************************************************
KLET OBSERVATORY - PRESENT AND FUTURE:
NEW TELESCOPE, DEDICATED MAINLY FOR NEO OBSERVATIONS, IS BEING
BUILT
AT THE KLET OBSERVATORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
Klet Observatory is known as one of most prolific minor planet
discovery sites (350 numbered minor planets in 1978-1998) and in
recent
years also belongs to the leading observers regarding CCD
follow-up
astrometry of NEOs (since 1993). For example 5125 precise
astrometric
positions were measured this year, including 1385 positions of
Near
Earth Asteroids. This number includes as many as 19 of 21
Potentially
Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) discovered since the beginning of this
year.
Six from these PHAs (1998 CS1, FH12, FF14, HD14, HT31 and 1998
KJ9)
were found out and measured as confirmation observations, the
first
observations after discovery, according to the Minor Planet
Center' WWW
TheNEOPage. These results have been made using 0.57-m reflector +
CCD
and 0.63-m photographic telescope only.
Now new 1.02-m telescope equipped with CCD camera is being built
at
Klet Observatory. The main goal of this project will consist in
CCD
follow-up astrometry of fainter NEOs in substantially longer arc
in
discovery opposition and recoveries of NEOs in the second
opposition to
improve their orbits, but some observing time will be devoted to
the
special search programme. All observing time will be dedicated to
the
Klet team (Jana Ticha, Milos Tichy and Zdenek Moravec).
Our project uses existing infrastructure of our observatory and
upgrades existing dome. New optics and CCD detector is funded
partly by
the state support in Southbohemian region of the Czech republic
and
partly by the government grant.
For more information you can visit our homepage
http://www.klet.cz
or http://www.ipex.cz/klet
We hope that - after completing this new larger telescope - we
shall be
able to participate more usefully in study of small bodies in the
Solar
System and in the international(!) effort to recognize and reduce
asteroid and comet hazard. (1998 July 5)
Jana Ticha (jticha@klet.cz)
Director of the Klet Observatory
================
(2) CLOSE APPROACHES BETWEEN ASTEROIDS AND PLANETS
From Sormano Astronomical Observatory <sormano@tin.it>
A list of close encounters of asteroids with planets Mercury,
Venus and
Mars for the next two hundred years is available at
http://www.brera.mi.astro.it/sormano/pcel.html
Objects have been selected on the basis of their Minimum Orbital
Intersection Distance from the planet (MOID < 0.02 AU) and
integrated
numerically (taking into account perturbations by all planets
except
Pluto, but including the Moon as a separate body), looking for
close
approaches within 0.02 AU.
A similar list (containing close approaches with the Earth) is
also
available at
http://www.brera.mi.astro.it/sormano/mbpl.html
Piero Sicoli and Francesco Manca
Sormano Astronomical Observatory (sormano@tin.it)
MPC code 587
=====================
(3) GARETH WILLIAMS ON 1998 DK36
From Sky Reporter <njsurf.com/skyviews>
July 3, 1998
Astronomers Say They Have Found a New Class of Asteroid
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
[....]
In a press release distributed Thursday, Dr. David Tholen and a
graduate student, Robert Whiteley, reported that the asteroid
circles
the sun entirely within Earth's orbit. All other known
Earth-approaching asteroids travel in orbits that lie at least
partly
outside Earth's orbit. [....]
But Dr. Gareth Williams of the Central Bureau for Astronomical
Telegrams in Cambridge, Mass., cast doubt on the assertion that
the
asteroid orbits the sun entirely within Earth's orbit.
"That orbital calculation was based on just two brief
observations of
the object, one lasting seven minutes on the night of Feb. 23,
and the
other on Feb. 24 for four minutes," Williams said. "Of
the solutions we
plotted, some showed the asteroid's orbit to be entirely within
the
Earth's orbit, but others showed part of the orbit outside the
Earth's
orbit." [....]
In any case, Tholen said, "1998 DK36 is nothing to lose
sleep over.
It's the ones we haven't found that are of concern."
(C) 1998 Sky Reporter
=================
(4) ARMAGEDDON BLASTS SCIENCE
Flights of Physics Fancy in Hollywood
From ABCNEWS.com
http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/armageddon980701.html
By Kenneth Chang
July 2 — “It’s the size of Texas, Mr. President,”
Billy Bob Thornton’s
character intones with due solemnity early in the movie
Armageddon.
“It’s what we call a global killer, the end of mankind.”
Hmm, an asteroid the size of Texas speeding right at Earth. That’s
just
the first instance of the makers of Armageddon making up the
science.
In reality, there aren’t any asteroids the size of Texas out
there. Not
one.
Of course, no one expects a premium on scientific accuracy in a
summer
popcorn movie. But we thought we’d offer some appreciation
for just how
silly Hollywood physics can be.
[Warning: we divulge the plot, but that’s hardly the reason
to go see
the movie, anyway. And the ending? They save the world. See? You
weren’t surprised, were you?] Okay, let’s run through
the numbers.
Spinning the Space Station
En route to the asteroid, the two space shuttles head to the
Russian
space station to refuel. (Why does the space station just happen
to
have few hundred thousand pounds of highly explosive rocket fuel
lying
around? We’ll just stick to the movie’s main physics
fantasies.)
To simulate gravity (and save movie makers the trouble of faking
weightlessness), the cosmonaut aboard the space station—no
one calls it
Mir—fires a few rockets to put the space station into the
spin. How
fast does it need to spin to reproduce Earth gravity?
Assuming the space station’s spoke arms—where the
shuttles dock—are
about 50 feet long, the answer is 8 revolutions a minute. That
makes it impossible to dock—it’d be like trying to
drive a car on
ice-covered roads into a spinning parking garage. There’s
another, more
fundamental, problem: The artificial gravity points in the wrong
direction.
Think of spinning rides at the amusement park. The spinning
motion
creates an artificial gravity, an effective outward-pushing
force. On
the space station, the spinning would tend to throw the
astronauts down
the station’s spoke arms and back onto the shuttle. Also,
the
artificial gravity would taper off to nothing at the center.
But, the movie’s artificial gravity somehow points down, not
outward,
and appears to work equally well throughout the station. The
astronauts
walk around happily, at least until the station … well,
special effects
happen.
Oops, Missed the Turn
After they leave the space station, they head to the moon, and
then
pull a slingshot U-turn with all engines blasting, ostensibly
using the
moon’s gravity, to increase their speed and come up behind
the
asteroid.
Imagine you’re in your car approaching a sharp hairpin turn.
You floor
the accelerator. What happens? You fly off the road.
Same thing here. In the real universe, that maneuver would send
the
spacecraft flying right past the moon and away from the asteroid.
Houston, We Have a Math Problem
When the movie astronauts arrive at the asteroid, that’s
where the real
numbers problems arise.
The movie’s plot is to drill an 800-foot-deep hole, drop in
a nuclear
bomb, boom! and the explosion blows the asteroid in two pieces
that fly
apart in a V-pattern, missing Earth on both sides.
Characters repeatedly refer to a “zero barrier” point.
Closer than
that, and supposedly there’s not enough time for the two
pieces to
spread out and miss Earth. One newscaster says the asteroid
passes zero
barrier 3 hours, 37 minutes before impact. Multiply that time by
the
asteroid’s 22,000 mph speed. That means zero barrier is
80,000 miles
out from Earth.
Earth is 8,000 miles wide. Assuming the asteroid is headed toward
the
bulls’-eye middle, that means you have to deflect both
halves by half
that, or 4,000 miles. At the zero barrier point that means
changing the
course of the rocks by 2.8 degrees. Doesn’t sound too bad,
does it?
Try Giving It a Push
Except Texas is big. Real big. At 800 miles across, it’s
one-third
wider than the largest known asteroid.
Something this big is also heavy. Assuming the asteroid is a
nice,
round, 800-mile-wide sphere and as dense as a typical asteroid,
it
would weigh about 7 billion trillion pounds. (That’s 7,
followed by 21
zeros.)
(In the production notes, director Michael Bay says, “We
decided to
take liberties and underscore the jeopardy. We didn’t think
the
audience would believe something 5 or 6 miles long could kill the
Earth.” It’s our fault Hollywood movies can’t be
realistic.)
Now let’s figure out how fast you have to push those two
chunks in the
up and down directions to make them miss. Simple calculation:
4,000
miles divided by 3 hours, 37 minutes equals 1,106 mph.
How much energy is that, blasting two half-Texas-size rocks to
just
over 1,100 miles per hour? The equivalent of 500 million
10-megaton
nuclear bombs. The would-be world rescuers brought along just one
bomb.
Oops.
Just Beneath the Surface
The movie also makes a great fuss about detonating the bomb 800
feet
down. Again, this is a Texas-size asteroid. That means they
buried the
bomb 0.02 percent of the way down to the center. Scaling this
down to
more manageable dimensions, if the asteroid were the size of a
football
field, and the 50-yard line is the center of the asteroid, the
yahoos
in the movie buried their firecracker less than three-quarters of
inch
from the end zone.
Would a nuclear bomb detonated 800 feet down into Earth split the
planet in half? Would it even break apart Texas? No and no.
Even if the asteroid did split, what are the chances that it
would
split into exactly two equal shapes that travel along the perfect
paths
to avoid the Earth? Nil.
One last thought: They’ve destroyed the asteroid and are now
zooming
back to Earth at 22,000 mph. How do they stop?
Disclaimer: Armageddon was made by Touchstone Pictures, a part of
Disney. ABCNEWS is also a division of Disney. But that doesn’t
mean we
have to say anything nice about Armageddon.
Copyright 1998 ABCNews
====================
(5) SCIENCE FICTION WITHOUT THE SCIENCE:
COMPARED TO ARMAGGEDON, DEEP IMPACT LOOKS LIKE
A PHD THESIS
From Steven Excell <excell@cris.com>
[as posted on the meteorite-list]
None of the science is remotely accurate. Armageddon makes Deep
Impact
look like a Ph.D. thesis by comparison.
In Armageddon:
The Earth is bombarded with periodic meteor showers for many
weeks
leading up to the expected arrival of the Big One. The showers
are
shown far in outer space heading towards the Earth for a direct
hit.
There is no bollide breaking up on entry into the Earth's
atmosphere.
Yet, Manhattan is pelted with meteorites like a shotgun blast.
The
meteors streak in almost horizonal to the streets of New York
City.
The main asteroid reminds me of Superman's secret lair at the
North
Pole -- stalagmites everywhere -- and no smooth surface with
impact
craters or pock-marks. Yet, one of the two space shuttles land in
this
geologic briar patch without injury.
The asteroid has its own Grand Canyon -- complete with
sedimentary
layers and erosion.
The asteroid has gravity because rovers travel with wheels on the
ground, the space shuttle makes a glide landing and people walk
around
without tethers. However, one of the rovers jumps over the abyss
of the
Grand Canyon. So this is an asteroid where gravity comes and
goes.
The space shuttle flies in outer space and around the moon like
an
airplane or WW II fighter plane. Of course, no one is weightless
in
outer space while on the shuttle (they walk around). Yet
they
practiced weightlessness in the NASA water tank training facility
before taking off.
The astronomer who discovers the main asteroid is an
improverished,
drunken reprobate who lives in a junky trailer and fights with
his
combative wife -- yet the astronomer owns his own major
observatory.
Now that I think about it, most of my astronomer friends became
impoverished after buying their telescopes -- and some had to
convince
their doubting spouses that a telescope was a more important
investment
than their annual IRA contribution -- so this part may be
accurate
after all.
The movie is so bad, I almost slept through it. My wife
actually gave
it a B+ as an "action movie," and said, "It was
like science fiction
without the science."
Steven Excell
Seattle, Washington USA
E-Mail: excell@concentric.net
===================
(6) OPEN LETTER TO STEVEN SPIELBERG:
FREE SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING "DEEP
IMPACT"
From Ed Grondine <epgrondine@hotmail.com>
RELEASE:
These suggestions are freely offered for you to use as you see
fit,
with no expectation of compensation.
E.P. Grondine
7/2/98
Dear Mr. Spielberg,
I went out and saw the movie "Armageddon" last night.
Luckily for you
there at Dreamworks it is not going to be the summer block buster
which
Disney has hoped for. We may have found out how much action is
too much
action, and it is quite likely that your own movie "Deep
Impact" is
going to continue to make money for the rest of the summer,
despite the
wide spread criticism it has received for having too little
action.
While at the time Deep Impact was made the special effects
studios
were all under tremendous demand, I think that with another $10
to $15
million dollar expenditure now you could add some action to the
movie
and turn it from a good movie into a great one, and thus increase
its
long run revenue flow substantially.
Here's how:
First off, Deep Impact lacks a sense of suspense, because the
audience
can not picture the impact which is going to occur at the end of
movie.
I know you tried to correct this by the advertising campaign that
accompanied the opening of the movie, but there is an even better
way.
By relying on Dreamworks' superb abilities to render dinosaurs,
used so
well in Jurassic Park, you could open the movie by showing the
K/T
impact event very realistically. The first scene would
center on a
pack of small predator dinosaurs hunting a herd of large
herbivore
dinosaurs in what is now Canada. Now these small predator
dinosaurs are
not stupid and are actually evolving into an intelligent species.
Open with a face shot of the leader of the predator pack, who
signals
his fellows into stampeding one of the large herbivore dinosaurs
into a pit-trap. The small predators surround the pit, and
as their
leader raises a rock above his head to throw onto the trapped
herbivore,
the K/T asteroid comes down. There is a blinding flash of
light, a
rumbling of the Earth, and then a cloud of vaporized rock rushes
over
the horizon and sets everything, including the small predators,
on fire.
The segment would end with a face shot of the completely burned
small
predator dinosaur leader, showing that he is aware that he is
dying and
wondering what happened. This would beat the hell out of
Charlton
Heston's speech in Armageddon.
The next improvement to the movie could be made immediately
before the
President's announcement. Here there could be a development of
the
Russian astronaut's character: He comes home to his apartment to
a wife
about to leave him for obsessing about his secret work and giving
her
little time. At the time of the Presidential announcement
there could
be other simultaneous announcements by other national leaders,
European, Japanese, closing with the Russian astronaut's family's
reaction. Besides leading to greater involvement on the part of
overseas audiences, this set-up could lead to more action shots
at Deep
Impact's close.
The first few frames of the Spaceship Messiah approaching the
comet
look so much like a plastic model that they force a suspension of
the
suspension of disbelief in any viewer. Copying these frames
through
some gauze or a vaseline plate might do the trick here.
After the Messiah fails, Deep Impact's action drags. Stock
footage of
the launch of Titan 4 rockets, computer renderings of the failure
of
their nuclear charges to stop the comet, stock footage of
launches of
smaller Atlas rockets, and the failure of their nuclear charges
as well
could be inserted to heighten the sense of approaching doom. You
could
throw in a European Ariane 5 or Japanese H-2 launch for the
foreign
market. The President's final speech could be overdubbed
from "our
Titans have failed" to "our rockets have
failed".
At the time of the impact, the flooding of New York is shown,
then the
flooding of Washington. As the kid begins to run up the
mountain,
shots of the flooding of Richmond could be spliced in to give a
greater
sense of the approaching tidal wave.
Now comes the real good part. A false conclusion, a la the
first
Terminator film.
In reality, the Messiah's final effort would just lead to smaller
fragments, and additional shots show this. First show the
kid, his
girlfriend, and the baby being set on fire from the thermal blast
of
these small fragments burning up in the atmosphere. This is
destruction on a more human scale, something that Deep Impact has
failed at.
To increase demand in the European market, next cut to Ireland on
fire
going under water from the tidal wave. For the South
American market,
show Miami on fire being swamped.
Next comes the impact of a large fragment on, say, Saint Louis or
Chicago.
Then blow the Messiah's astronauts' families to bits as they sit
at the
control room in Houston. You could accomplish this by
re-creating the
control room shot from the "final farewell" scene and
then detonating
some explosives outside of the set. Use plenty of stage
blood.
Next show Paris on fire going under the tidal wave, which should
greatly increase French speaking revenues.
Finally, show the Russian astronaut's family fighting fires that
are
being set by fragments from the impact falling back to Earth.
To account for all this added action, at the end, when the
President is
standing in front of the ruins of the Capitol, after he describes
the
floods, insert couple of frames for a long pause before he goes
on to
say "We have survived".
Like the release says, Mr. Spielberg, feel free to use these. But
if
you ever decide to take over the Warner Brothers television
network,
please give me a call. I have a couple of treatments for some
science
fiction shows that should be able to clear Star Trek from the
airwaves.
Best wishes -
Ed
----------------------------------------
THE CAMBRIDGE-CONFERENCE NETWORK (CCNet)
----------------------------------------
The CCNet is a scholarly electronic network. To subscribe, please
contact the moderator Benny J Peiser at <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>.
Information circulated on this network is for scholarly and
educational
use only. The attached information may not be copied or
reproduced for
any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright
holders.
The electronic archive of the CCNet can be found at
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cccmenu.html