PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet 70/2003 - 9 September 2003
--------------------------------
"One very easy way to reduce future asteroid scares is by
dropping
the Torino Scale from the JPL and Pisa risk pages.
-- Brian Marsden, MPC, Space.com, 9
Sept. 2003
"SPACE.com has learned that the ranking system has already
undergone
a revision, taking into account earlier criticisms."
--Rob Britt, on attempts to revise the
Torino Scale, 9 Sept 2003
If we consider future asteroid scares, they are likely to be for
the
300m - 800m range, since all the larger NEAs will soon be under
orbital surveillance. Why then deprive the public of the last
handful
of doomsday predictions and subsequent retractions?
--Jens Kieffer-Olsen, CCNet, 9 Sept. 2003
(1) ASTEROID SCARES, WHY THEY WON'T END
(2) ASTEROID DISCOVERY BRINGS FOCUS OF WORLD TO REGION
(3) NASA CRAFTING BAG OF TRICKS TO DEFLECT HURTLING ASTEROIDS
(4) ERRATIC VACILLATION OF TORINO SCALE VALUES CAN BE A PROBLEM
(5) THE TORINO SCALE
(6) WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF DOOSMDAY ASTEROID SCARES
(7) IGNORE ASTEROID SCARES
(8) ELECTROPHONICS
(9) MEANWHILE IN BRITAIN, ONE WEEK AFTER THE ALL-CLEAR ...
(10) AND FINALLY: BUSINESS AS USUAL AS ANOTHER ASTEROID REACHES
TS1 AND EDGES TOWARDS PS+
--THIS IS JUST TO SHOW THAT TS1 AND PS+ RATINGS ARE MEANINGLESS
FOR THE PUBLIC IN
THE EARLY PHASES OF
NEO OBSERVATIONS
===============
(1) ASTEROID SCARES, WHY THEY WON'T END
Space.com, 9 September 2003
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_scares_030909.html
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
Kevin Yates could not foresee the global media circus and public
anxiety he would fuel last week with a routine Web posting about
a potentially dangerous asteroid.
Nor could he know that days later a handful researchers would
suggest ditching the four-year-old Torino Scale, which rates
asteroid hazards like the Richter Scale ranks earthquakes and was
designed to improve communication between astronomers and the
public.
In a telephone interview yesterday, the Torino Scale's creator
stands by its value, but SPACE.com has learned that the
ranking system has already undergone a revision, taking into
account earlier criticisms, as part of a forthcoming book.
The media firestorm is just the latest in a long series of
foibles involving asteroid researchers and journalists. It began
Sept. 3.
Earth is doomed, again
Yates said received a request for information from a BBC radio
reporter about a newfound asteroid whose chance of hitting Earth
could not be ruled out. As project manager of the British
government's Near Earth Object Information Center (NEOIC), Yates
posted information and expert quotations about the space rock on
the organization's web site.
Newspapers and web sites around the world quickly warned of a
treacherous asteroid called 2003 QQ47. It was on course to
destroy the planet, many stories said.
"Earth is doomed" was among the most outlandish of a
slew of misleading headlines.
Few of the publications bothered to mention a day later that the
odds of impact had dropped to zero. The coverage was called
"obsolete and overblown" by one asteroid researcher,
the lack of retractions "shocking and reprehensible."
The odds of collision were put 1-in-909,000 in the year 2014. The
rock ranked a 1 on the Torino Scale, meaning it deserved
"careful monitoring" by astronomers. Zero is the lowest
and 10 is a worst-case scenario. In many stories, these truths
were buried below a frosting of frightening adjectives and
alarmingly active verbs.
Yates, whose agency is barely a year old, became a lighting rod
for criticism from his peers, astronomers and asteroid analysts
who have been similarly bitten by the media in recent years. What
Yates didn't fully understand, but what his colleagues did, was
that any mention of an asteroid with miniscule odds of impact
could become fodder for outlandish claims of impending
Armageddon.
Doom sells papers.
By the end of the day -- and even before some of the stories were
published -- more scientific observations had been gathered and
the chance of collision was reduced to zero, "leaving many
journalists with egg on their faces," wrote Leon Jaroff in
Time Magazine.
The scientific outcome, indeed the whole process, was routine.
Three dozen other newfound asteroids this year have had similar
long-term non-zero chances of impact. Of these, five still have
not been ruled out. Three of the objects, in addition to 2003
QQ47, ranked 1 on the Torino Scale.
But for whatever reasons the media didn't notice any these
objects.
Importantly, last week's episode was a virtual rerun of four
others that have occurred since 1998. There is one key
difference, however. Each time previously, astronomers worked
diligently on ways to prevent a recurrence. This time, there are
a predictable round of accusations and more suggestions for how
to improve the system.
But the sentiment among eight experts interviewed by SPACE.com is
clearly different: It will happen again.
Other victims
"We have all been victims of this same problem with earlier
impact scares, and we have all learned from this," said
Brian Marsden, who runs the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge,
Mass. "Kevin [Yates] is newer to the game, but I suspect
that he, too, will come to appreciate that the media are
frequently quite incorrigible and will milk a story for all they
think it is worth, whatever we may say."
Marsden knows this better than anyone in the Near Earth Object
(NEO) community, a loose affiliation of scientists who study
comets and asteroids that share the general space through which
Earth orbits.
Marsden is the father of asteroid controversy.
His Minor Planet Center is like Grand Central Station for
asteroid observations. All the data and analysis flows through
there.
It was Marsden who issued the first modern public warning about
an asteroid that might hit Earth. On March 11, 1998, he put out a
press statement regarding asteroid 1997 XF11, between 1 and 2
kilometers (0.62-1.24 miles) wide. "The chance of an actual
collision is small, but one is not entirely out of the
question," the statement said.
The story went global.
Within a day, further study by two separate groups (spurred on by
Marsden's comments) showed that 1997 XF11 could not strike the
planet.
Yesterday Marsden told me he'd used words that were "a
little unwise. I should have realized that some people read only
first paragraphs." The statement later noted that the
computations were uncertain.
Marsden and other scientists have disagreed ever since about
exactly what happened and why. But most of them agree on one
thing:
"These mistakes are made only once by each person,"
said David Morrison, a Senior Scientist at NASA's Ames Research
Center and chair of working group on NEOs in the International
Astronomical Union. "And I learned my lesson."
The weekend news
Morrison had been earnestly hunting for dangerous asteroids for
12 years. He's one of the founding fathers of the Spaceguard
Survey, an effort mandated by Congress, financed mostly by NASA,
and charged with finding 90 percent of all Near Earth Objects.
These NEOs are asteroids and comets larger than 1 kilometer (0.62
miles) that roam the region of space also occupied by Earth.
Morrison's lesson came in 2000.
By then, having learned from the 1997 XF11 affair and another
false alarm in 1999, Morrison had helped institute a 72-hour
review period by the International Astronomical Union. Asteroid
data would be more thoroughly vetted before public release of
potentially alarming impact odds.
Then a relatively small asteroid named 2000 SG344 was determined
to have a 1-in-500 chance of impact, the highest ever. The review
process kicked in, and the odds were verified by other
researchers. NASA issued a press release on a Friday. Headlines
were made. Hours later, new observations rolled in and the impact
probability evaporated.
Because it was the weekend, Morrison and his colleagues say, most
reporters did not pick up on the revised information.
"Once again the astronomers looked foolish," Morrison
and his colleagues write in a forthcoming book, "Impacts and
the Public: Communicating the Nature of the Impact Hazard."
Marsden disagrees with who was at fault. He calls the IAU review
process "stupid," and says it was not the reporters at
fault, but the fact that astronomers weren't available on the
weekend to be interviewed.
However, there is agreement on one important point: The problem
with 2000 SG344 was a direct result of a 1999 public flap.
Charging cover-up
Benny Peiser was at the center of the 1999 controversy. The
social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the
UK runs an electronic newsletter called CCNet, which monitors NEO
research and examines the impact of discoveries and press
coverage on public perception.
In a now-infamous situation involving asteroid 1999 AN10, Peiser
found online an obscure scientific paper that described that
asteroid's less than 1-in-a-million chance of hitting Earth. He
put the paper in his newsletter and, in Morrison's words,
"charged cover-up."
A standard round of press hype ensued, slanting toward the
suggestion that scientists might hide information about a deadly
asteroid. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: I should remind readers that the
paper in question, despite the exceedingly low odds, suggested
that an attempt to nuke
the asteroid might be necessary; BP].
Astronomers have since felt wedged between an asteroid and a hard
place, unsure about when, whether, and how overtly to publicize
what they know about asteroids about which -- and this is
important -- they know very, very little. The initial odds are
typically based on just a few days of observations, which cover a
tiny segment of an asteroid's overall orbital path.
The outcome of the 1999 AN10 incident was the 72-hour review
period that created the climate for the 2000 SG344 mistakes.
Little changed. Last year, astronomers made no unusual
announcements about asteroid 2002 NT7, which for a time carried
6-in-a-million odds of a future Earth impact. The BBC's Web site
picked up on the data and led the way in warning that the object
was on a collision course with Earth, which no astronomer ever
said was the case. Within days odds were reduced to zero. One
astronomer called the journalism in that case "utter
rubbish."
Now, barely a year later, other media took the same approach with
another newly discovered space rock.
A clear pattern
A clear pattern emerges from the asteroid scares. Odds of an
impact are widely reported, then within days or hours new data
turns up to bring the chances to zero.
So I asked Morrison and the seven other experts: Why not simply
keep the data under wraps until more observations come in? After
all, it is common practice with other scientific work to go
through extensive internal and peer review -- sometimes lasting
months -- before going public with important findings.
This is one of the few ideas about which they all agree, and they
all think it's a bad idea.
As Morrison puts it, "People think of these predictions as
relating to them and their future safety. These are not just
routine scientific results."
As the scientists say it, the public demands to know. But there's
a more subtle reason lurking in the background. While Joe and
Jane Public are unlikely to clamor for this data, there's always
someone around to charge cover-up if it isn't released
immediately.
Posting orbital data "keeps the conspiracy folks from
getting too vocal," said Donald Yeomans, in charge of the
Near Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL).
Yeomans also points out that the data is peer reviewed. His team
crosschecks results with a similar group in Italy, which runs a
program called NEODys at the University of Pisa. Both groups
maintain Web sites that are available to the public and,
importantly, to amateur astronomers.
The amateur contribution to the search effort, which arose partly
do to limited funding for asteroid search and study, is another
key reason for posting the data.
"Most of the follow-up activity is by amateur astronomers,
with new ones coming along all the time," says Marsden of
the Minor Planet Center. "I think it would be most unwise to
limit access to the Web page."
Who is to blame?
Though frustrated with the media, total exasperation on the part
of asteroid experts seems to be evaporating as fast as impact
odds are typically reduced.
"Actually the situation has gotten better," said
Richard Binzel, who in 1999 unveiled the Torino Scale for gauging
asteroid risk. "Overall the reporting has gotten better --
in terms of the content correctly conveying that new data will
almost certainly reduce the threat to Torino Scale zero."
The Torino scale was mentioned in more stories last week than has
ever been the case before with asteroid scares.
But none of this stopped Peiser, the social anthropologist, from
putting on the gloves in this, round five of the Asteroid Scares.
To journalists and their unwillingness to run retractions or
corrective stories on day two, Peiser had this to say: "This
lack of journalistic prudence and accountability is shocking and
reprehensible."
Peiser also lashed out at the NEOIC, calling Yates' posting of
information about asteroid 2003 QQ47 "ill-timed and
unnecessary."
The asteroid is about three-quarters of a mile wide (1.2
kilometers). It was discovered Aug. 24 by the LINEAR search
program at MIT. Yates' NEOIC posting said the rock "would
deliver around 350,000 megatons of energy in an impact with
Earth," a highly quotable phrase that was highly quoted.
Like others interviewed for this article, Peiser believes the
rock would not have been so widely reported last week, nor with
such misleading headlines, had the NEOIC simply stayed quiet.
The concern, on the part of Peiser and others, is that asteroid
scares erode scientific credibility.
Yates defends his actions. He hoped the NEOIC's Web posting would
"promote understanding of the process of asteroid detection,
tracking and risk assessment."
He is also well aware that sensational headlines sell newspapers.
"The level of interest in our web article did come as a
surprise to us, but we do not believe it is fair to point the
finger too strongly at the media," Yates said. "Whilst
a number of the headlines were once again sensational, our
assessment is that the content of many articles marked an
improvement in accuracy and balance over previous asteroid
stories."
Yates went on to say that the NEOIC will continue to "work
with media and science communication experts to increase
awareness of trends in reporting complex scientific issues such
as these."
Junk the Torino Scale?
Meanwhile, over the weekend, the Torino Scale came under fire.
David Asher of the Armagh Observatory called the rating system
"absurd." An ensuing discussion led Peiser and Marsden,
yesterday, to call for the scale to be sacked.
"One very easy way to reduce" future asteroid scares
"is by dropping the Torino Scale from the JPL and Pisa risk
pages," said Marsden, the Minor Planet Center director.
Binzel and his colleagues -- Morrison of Ames and Clark Chapman
of the Southwest Research Institute -- have already completed a
revision of the Torino Scale. It stresses that an asteroid rated
1 is a normal event "that is likely to go away" and can
be ignored by journalists.
The revisions will be part of the book mentioned above,
"Impacts and the Public."
Binzel prefers not to engage in a debate about the merits of the
Torino Scale until the revisions are published, but he does say
the scale has been effective.
"The Torino Scale ... gives both the astronomers,
journalists, and the public a common point of reference," he
said. "We have made a good leap up the learning curve where
journalists (not to mention editors) are now learning that
something with a score of "1" on the Torino Scale is
not news, just as a magnitude 1 earthquake in California is not
news."
Not again
Whatever the fate of the Torino Scale, there will be plenty more
opportunities for asteroid hunters to interact with the media.
The pace of discovery increases each year.
Astronomers might reverse the focus of their public comments,
Binzel suggests. Rather than discuss the 1-in-a-million odds of
an impact, they could emphasize the overwhelming odds that an
object will go away.
Paul Chodas, who ferrets out the trajectories of potentially
threatening rocks at JPL's Near Earth Object Program Office,
offered other suggestions for avoiding a repeat of last week's
events.
"I think it is important that we reserve press announcements
for those cases that we find truly remarkable, and even partially
worthy of any over-hyped press coverage they might receive,"
Chodas said. "It might also have been wise for the NEOIC to
contact us before making announcements based on our
calculations."
An expanded internal dialogue has already started. In part as a
response to the exchange between scientists generated by the
reporting of this article, Chodas, Yates and Marsden are
discussing ways to improve cooperation and coordination.
But no one expects to have much effect on the media.
"I am sure the NEOIC won't repeat that mistake again,"
said Benny Peiser. "But I am equally sure that the latest
asteroid scare won't be the last."
Copyright 2003, Space.com
MODERATOR'S NOTE: I am pleased to learn about the latest attempts
to rectify the
Torino Scale. However, after the lessons of the QQ47 fiasco, the
responsibility
for any future scare that is triggered as a reaction to high TS
values will
fully and squarely fall on the shoulders of those who believe it
can be
salvaged. BP
==================
(2) ASTEROID DISCOVERY BRINGS FOCUS OF WORLD TO REGION
El Defensor Chieftain, 6 September 2003
http://www.dchieftain.com/news/news3_09062003.html
By Pepita Ridgeway
An asteroid two-thirds of a mile wide, discovered on Aug. 24 by
the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program on White Sands
Missile Range, made world news this week as astronomers tried to
calculate whether Earth was in its orbit.
Initial calculations by astronomers estimated that the asteroid
could hit the planet in 2014 and world media scooped up the
discovery, announcing that the asteroid was first observed in
Socorro.
Grant Stokes, principle investigator of the LINEAR program and
associate head of the aerospace division at Lincoln laboratory,
said it is now known that the asteroid, designated as
"2003QQ47," could never reach Earth.
"It was an unfortunate process of release of information to
the public. We send the information to the Minor Planets Center
at the Harvard Smithsonian in Cambridge , Mass. If it is a known
object, the center will put the observation on its catalogues.
"If it is not a known object, they give a discovery
designation. If it's interesting, observers worldwide take follow
up data on the object. LINEAR searches broad areas of the sky and
other astronomers follow up the data after about six days of the
orbit being determined. They are propagating a very long time
into the future. The error bubble, our understanding of where
it's going to be -- includes the Earth. The error bubble is huge.
There was an indication of a potential collision. This is exactly
what happened in this case.
"Each day we get new data and the error bubble collapses, as
has happened in every one of these cases in the past. As we get
more data, all of a sudden the potential for a collision is
infinitesimally small. The 2014 collision is now zero
probability," said Stokes.
The LINEAR project, at Stallion Range, about 25 miles from
Socorro, is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln
Laboratory program funded by the U.S. Air Force and NASA. The
goal of the LINEAR program is to demonstrate the application of
technology originally developed for the surveillance of earth
orbiting satellites, to the problem of detecting and cataloging
Near Earth Asteroids (also referred to as Near Earth Objects, or
NEOs) that threaten the Earth.
Stokes said that while all the discoveries so far have been
harmless to Earth, "it is still well worthwhile going and
finding all of these objects that could potentially come to the
Earth. There have been over 11,000 (sic) potential objects
discovered that are one-kilometer and larger that would have been
near earth asteroids. Of those, LINEAR has found more than half.
The statistics for collision is that it is unlikely that we will
find something over the next 100 years. But it is worthwhile
having modest resources to go out and find these."
The LINEAR program uses a pair of GEODSS telescopes at Lincoln
Laboratory's Test Site. The telescopes are equipped with Lincoln
Laboratory developed CCD electro-optical detectors and collected
data is processed on site to generate observations. Observations
are then sent to the main Lincoln Laboratory site on Hanscom AFB
in Lexington, Mass. where they are linked from night to night.
LINEAR is responsible for 70 percent of the worldwide discovery
stream of asteroids and comets, said Stokes, more than half of
all known near Earth asteroids and well over 100 comets. "It
has been a very significant contribution to the research of comet
science. Because of their early discovery, astronomers now have
the time to schedule the instruments to see inbound comets.
Previously, when comets were only found with a tail, and much
closer, observers could only observe them on their outbound
orbit."
"LINEAR Discovers the majority of comets these days,"
said Stokes.
"The way we operate is a little different," said Stokes
when asked the name of the new asteroid. "Standard asteroids
surveys are personality driven. Often they are named after the
Ph.D. astronomer at the telescope. We have added an industrial
model to that. The only way to go out and discover that amount of
sky is to observe all night every night. We have a team of about
12 people that runs those telescopes that make this process work.
It's not personalized. All the discovered comets have the words
LINEAR in their designation. It is very much a team effort. Not a
single-person kind of thing."
Copyright © 1999-2002 El Defensor Chieftain. All rights
reserved.
===============
(3) NASA CRAFTING BAG OF TRICKS TO DEFLECT HURTLING ASTEROIDS
The Birmingham News, 8 September 2003
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1063012553228960.xml
KENT FAULK
News staff writer
One day Earthlings could use lassos and lasers or solar sails to
nudge Earth-bound asteroids out of the way, researchers say.
The ideas may seem farfetched. But the threat is real, the
technology is possible, and a few researchers said last week that
nations should begin taking steps to defend the planet from such
hits.
"We have the emerging technologies to do the job at some
point in the future," said Jonathan Campbell, a NASA
researcher at the National Space Science Technology Center in
Huntsville. "The question is, do we have the international
will."
The issue came to the forefront last week when British
astronomers were reported as giving an asteroid about two-thirds
of a mile wide a one-in-909,000 chance of hitting the Earth in
2014. The next day, the astronomers said that after more
observation, they had determined asteroid 2003 QQ47 had virtually
no chance of hitting the Earth.
But for a day the question was there. What could be done if an
asteroid large enough to cause a global catastrophe was headed
toward Earth?
The first problem NASA researchers trying to perfect a means of
diverting incoming debris are tackling is spotting large
asteroids and comets, called Near Earth Objects.
NASA's Near Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in California is tracking 663 large asteroids, those bigger than
a half-mile in diameter, said Paul Chodas, research scientist in
that program.
1,200 asteroids:
Researchers believe about 1,200 asteroids of that size are in
near Earth orbit, which is within 30 million miles of the planet,
Chodas said. "Our goal is to discover 90 percent of these
large asteroids by 2008," he said.
Asteroids of that size could cause global climate change and kill
billions of people, Chodas said.
Odds of a collision with an asteroid that size is small, Chodas
said, since they hit just once in a half million years on
average.
Smaller asteroids, however, are more common - possibly in the
thousands or tens of thousands - and could cause severe regional
damage if they hit Earth, researchers say.
The last significant impact was in the unpopulated Tunguska
region of Russia in 1908, a group of 10 Marshall Space Flight
Center researchers noted in a 23-page paper they presented at an
engineering conference this summer. A 99-foot- to 198-foot-wide
object is believed to have struck in that area.
That paper, "Planetary Defense: Options for Deflection of
Near Earth Objects," says that if that same object had hit
Madison County, the majority of its 250,000 or so residents would
have been killed. If it had hit a city such as New York or
London, millions would have been killed, the report says.
The group studied seven methods for deflecting or destroying
asteroids or comets on a collision path with Earth and developed
computer models for them.
One was to blast them into small pieces with a nuclear weapon.
Another was to blast a nuclear weapon near the object and let the
thrust from gases being burned off the asteroid push it into
another orbit. And another was to tether a solar sail to slowly
pull an asteroid into a different path.
"We had a first estimate of what size and what type comets
and asteroids we could deflect with a given system," said
Rob Adams, an aerospace engineer in Advanced Planning and
Concepts at Marshall and lead author of the paper.
Campbell, part of another group of researchers working on the
problem, has filed a NASA patent on one idea - an inflatable
laser/solar reflector that could push asteroids into safer
orbits.
That idea calls for a spacecraft to fly toward the asteroid, and
detach a smaller spacecraft. They would be connected to each
other by a tether that would form a loop. The loop would have to
spin to match the motion of the object, then be moved over the
object and the tethers retracted to tighten the loop. A solar
reflector would be inflated. By continuously tilting the
reflector to capture sunlight, photons from the sunlight
gradually would push the asteroid into a safer orbit.
Moon lasers:
Another idea for which Campbell plans to file a patent would put
a bank of lasers on the moon to deflect incoming asteroids.
The debate over which method is the best continues, but Campbell
said he believes a multiple-layer defense is needed. "I
guess my answer is we should use them all," he said.
The paper from Adams' group urges more funding for studies in
detecting and deflecting Near Earth Objects.
"Despite the impression given by Hollywood, it is not
practical to wait until a specific threat is identified before
starting work on a mitigation system. Systems engineering, system
development and - in some cases - technology development, will
take several years," the report says.
Chodas doesn't advocate spending money just yet to develop a
system. "I think it's worthy of study. But I don't think
it's worthy of developing a system yet because the odds are we
won't have an asteroid on a collision course," he said.
But Chodas does support spending money to continue sending
spacecraft to asteroids to find out what they are made of and how
strong they are. "We need to know that if we are going to
try to deflect it," he said
Copyright 2003, The Birmingham News
============ LETTERS ===========
(4) ERRATIC VACILLATION OF TORINO SCALE VALUES CAN BE A PROBLEM
Kelly Beatty <kbeatty@SkyandTelescope.com>
Benny...
Let me add just a few more points, then I'll got back to being a
quiet
bystander.
First, one aspect of the Torino Scale's development that
certainly I, and
perhaps Rick Binzel, did not anticipate was that reporters would
want to
detail how a candidate object vacillates among the various
classification
levels on a day-to-day (indeed, hour-to-hour) basis. Instead I
imagined,
for example, that 2003 QQ47's initial TS ranking would reflect
the
summation of all observations made during much/all of its 2003
apparition,
with further refinement at the next favorable apparition. The
near-real-time posting of risk assessments is not necessarily a
*bad* thing
-- but it certainly provides a tempting excuse for abandoning
journalistic
restraint.
Second, I'd like to see the discussion expanded to explore the
factors that
trigger news-media interest, regardless of what metric is used to
describe
a candidate impactor. In the case of QQ47, it seems that said
trigger was
the combination of (1) a large object, 1+ km across (2) with
better than
one-in-a-million odds of striking (3) in the quite foreseeable
future. It
would be a simple matter to conduct a public-opinion poll to
gauge which of
these factors, or instead the Torino/Palermo rankings, mattered
most in
driving the story. (It certainly didn't help that the collision
risk was
initially reported by the NEOIC as the precise-sounding
1-in-909,000.)
Third, I'd like to hear from other journalists as to why the news
media
handle developing hurricanes much more matter-of-factly than they
do
asteroid scares. These two event scenarios have much in common,
especially
with respect to how extended observations serve to refine the
risk of landfall.
Kelly Beatty
Executive Editor
SKY & TELESCOPE
===============
(5) THE TORINO SCALE
A/CC - Bill Allen <ballen@hohmanntransfer.com>
>The Asteroid/Comet Connection website is absolutely right
when it
>criticises the confusing Torino language directed at the
wrong address:
>"It can take weeks or months, and sometimes longer, to
eliminate impact
>solutions, and it isn't unusual for a few of
>them during the process to rise to TS-1 ("merits special
monitoring"),
>which is only an alert to orbital dynamicists and to the
professional and
>amateur astronomers who do the observing."
I didn't realize that my statement could be taken as criticism of
the
Torino Scale. It was made only as an explanation to those new to
risk
monitoring, and I have rewritten it now to serve that purpose
more clearly.
It has been a continuing education for me to learn how best to
use the
Torino and Palermo scales in daily reporting about risk
monitoring, but I
don't have any problems with using them. It is much easier to use
the
Torino Scale for reporting about most objects and with a general
audience.
I have come to only make direct reference to the Palermo Scale
when the
point that needs to be made is worth the careful explanation that
must
accompany it.
//Bill
******************************************
The Asteroid/Comet
Connection
A central library of news & info links
http://www.HohmannTransfer.com/news.htm
alt: http://www.3dartist.com/news.htm
& the Catchall Catalog of Minor Objects
http://www.HohmannTransfer.com/moc/
Send news to: <news@hohmanntransfer.com>
Columbine, Inc. POB 4787 Santa Fe NM 87502
============
(6) WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF DOOSMDAY ASTEROID SCARES
Jens Kieffer-Olsen <dstdba@post4.tele.dk>
Dear Benny Peiser,
If we consider future asteroid scares, they are likely to
be for the 300m - 800m range, since all the larger NEAs
will soon be under orbital surveillance. Why then deprive
the public of the last handful of doomsday predictions and
subsequent retractions? I believe the egg on astronomers'
faces is a fair reflection of their present inability to dismiss
the possibility of an Earth-shattering asteroid impact. As
that
inability is about to be history, so will the splatter of egg.
Smaller asteroids of course also generate non-zero values
on the Torino scale, but I'm sure the newspaper headlines
will shrink considerably, when the virtual impactor is a
country killer rather than a continent killer.
Future doomsday predictions may be based on the discovery
of large comets. The lessons learned from recent asteroid
scares may come in handy during such a hectic but hopefully
brief period of global angst.
Yours sincerely
Jens Kieffer-Olsen, M.Sc.(Elec.Eng.)
Slagelse, Denmark
MODERATOR'S NOTE: I wish Jens Kieffer-Olsen was right. However,
if past
experience is anything to go by, even a smallish asteroid which
is
published on "impact risk" websites with a high TS or
PS value - even
if just for a single day, a week or a month - can easily trigger
another
round of doomsday headlines. Take for example 2000 SG344.
Although only
a tiny object that may in fact be man-made, an alarmist note to
the media
by a NASA official claimed that an impact could trigger a
disaster "100 times
stronger that the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima...". The
headlines were
accordingly:
"SEPT 21, 2030: 500/1 IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD
ASTEROID ON COLLISION COURSE
The Mirror, 6 September 2000
PUT the date in your diary - there is a 500-to-one chance the
world
will end on September 21 2030. Scientists have found an asteroid
which
they calculate could hit Earth that day with an explosion 100
times
stronger than the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima....."
----
In short, regardless what the size of an object that is drawing
the media's
attention simply because of its illogical and ahistoric TS value,
the
public will ask: So, how many atomb bombs would that be if it
hit....
BP
================
(7) IGNORE ASTEROID SCARES
Dave Tholen <tholen@IfA.Hawaii.Edu>
> What should the NEO community do after the pointless,
ill-advised and
> misleading asteroid scare over QQ47?
Discourage publicists from publicizing such occurrences. That
would
include you, Benny.
===============
(8) ELECTROPHONICS
Mike Baillie <m.baillie@qub.ac.uk>
Benny,
my assistant here in Belfast, Mr David Brown, reports that on
Saturday night
last, 6th Sept, about 9/9.30 pm, just south of Belfast, he saw a
large bright
meteor tracking approx SE to NW accompanied by an audible low
volume hiss.
This is the first time I've come across a local report of what
would have
to be an electrophonic effect.
Regards
Mike
===========
(9) MEANWHILE IN BRITAIN, ONE WEEK AFTER THE ALL-CLEAR ...
The Mirror, 8 September 2003
SO, an asteroid may hit the Earth in March 2014 (Daily Mirror,
September 3). Are we just going to sit and wait for it to destroy
us, or are the governments and military of the world going to
join forces and work out a way of preventing it from destroying
our homes?
--Richard Rhys Lloyd Colton, 8 September 2003
===============
(10) AND FINALLY: BUSINESS AS USUAL AS ANOTHER ASTEROID REACHES
TS1 AND EDGES TOWARDS PS+
--THIS IS JUST TO SHOW THAT TS1 AND PS+ RATINGS ARE MEANINGLESS
FOR THE PUBLIC IN
THE EARLY PHASES OF
NEO OBSERVATIONS
Asteroid/Comet Connection, 9 September 2003
http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm
2003 QO104 news: Early last evening in Pasadena, JPL issued a new
assessment for 2003 QO104
(http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2003qo104.html)
using new observations from Siding Spring Observatory in
Australia (http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/csssouth.html).
These were received ahead of Tuesday's Daily Orbit Update MPEC
(DOU) and added more than 26 hours to QO104's observation arc.
That arc is now not quite eight days long, so this new assessment
is still highly preliminary. JPL dropped the count of impact
solutions by seven, to 39 in the years 2009-2099, but is also now
showing Torino Scale 1 ratings (TS-1, "merits special
monitoring") for four impact solutions, one each in the
years 2009, 2031, 2034, and 2080.
And JPL has now put its cumulative Palermo Scale (PS) rating for
2003 QO104 at -0.01. This places the QO104 risk assessment on the
brink of where the analysis was for 2002 NT7 [link|alt] on July
23rd last year. At that time NT7 had multiple TS-1 ratings, and
an observing arc just under 14 days, when it became the first
object to go into positive PS ratings for impact solutions within
current lifetimes. This "historical" moment was picked
up and announced by the news media without first getting it put
into proper perspective by experts, and the news uproar went for
the eight days it took to eliminate NT7's last impact solutions.
The Palermo Scale (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/doc/palermo.html)
is a technical hazard scale and a companion to the Torino Scale
used for informing the public about risks. Rising above PS 0.0 is
passing the point where the risk calculated for a known object
becomes a little larger than the estimated random
"background" risk of being hit by something that wasn't
seen coming. The PS formula uses factors including mass and
warning time, and raises ratings for more mass and less warning.
QO104 is estimated at 2.658 km. wide, while NT7 was estimated at
2.03 km. when it went PS positive. And, at that time, NT7's first
TS-1 impact solution was 16+ years away, while QO104's first TS-1
is presently 5+ years away. So higher PS ratings for QO104 aren't
a surprise at this stage in the routine cycle of observation and
analysis.
2003 QO104 could become even more interesting before its impact
solutions are all eliminated. It may go PS positive for awhile,
and we could see the first-ever TS-2 rating: "A somewhat
close, but not unusual encounter. Collision is very
unlikely." But keep in mind how quickly other concerns such
as NT7 evaporated with just a little more observing time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Readers new to impact risk monitoring, please read
"Understanding Risk Pages" by Jon Giorgini of JPL (http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/by/giorgjon.htm).
Editors and journalists, please note that this News page (and
most other reporting on the A/CC site unless otherwise credited)
is from a journalist who follows this field closely but who is
not an authority. Please see a list of qualified experts
available to the news media for advice and quotation for articles
about impact risk possibilities.
-----------
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