
A small asteroid (~5 m) will hit Sudan on 2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC - d0mine
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/21074
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petercooper
Poor headline. It might hit Sudanese _airspace_ , but not "Sudan" as in the
land forming that country. It might not even high Sudanese airspace, as it'll
burn up in the "upper atmosphere."

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d0mine
Agreed.

 _"hit Sudan"_ is not as precise as _"hit Earth this morning, Oct. 7th, and
exploded in the atmosphere over northern Sudan."_
<http://www.spaceweather.com/>

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HendrikR
See this press release: <http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200819.html>

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ashleyw
For a moment I thought "~5 m" meant that it was going to be around 1/3 of the
"15 m" asteroid that hit earth and caused dinosaurs to go extinct.

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tlrobinson
Explain, for us astronomically-challenged, please?

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jbyers
This little asteroid will be 5 m(eters) in diameter, quite a lot less than 15
m(iles) in diameter. :)

Note that if we're talking about the asteroid that created the Chicxulub
crater, most references seem to have the size a bit smaller, ~6 miles in
diameter. Still, that's a big rock.

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eru
Remember the story about the NASA-engineers who mixed up imperial and metric
units?

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rkowalick
The US doesn't use imperial units.

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eru
Sorry. I meant to reference the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter
(<http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/unit-mixups.html#mco>).

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d0mine
A little animation <http://www.astronomy.ru/forum/index.php?topic=45265.0>

Minor Planet Electronic Circular <http://cfa-
www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html>

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run4yourlives
Anyone know if this is something of significance, or is this just going to put
a little hole in the ground?

Aside: Poor (people of) Sudan. Like that country needs more issues.

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d0mine
"It is very unlikely that any sizable fragments will survive passage through
the Earth's atmosphere." <http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html>

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run4yourlives
In other words, barely news.

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utx00
it's the first time something like this has been predicted though. that's
something.

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run4yourlives
Fair point, I missed that.

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lutorm
Not to mention the 1kt energy is not too shabby, even if it's far up.

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aston
What will the impact be?

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gduffy
<http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html>

"The absolute magnitude indicates that the object will not survive passage
through the atmosphere."

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henning
WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, WAKE UP SHEEPLE

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comatose_kid
Excellent. A post that teaches me something about hacking and about how to
become a better entrepreneur at the same time.

