Category: Gravity Storm

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So You’re Saying There’s A Chance

Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered several weeks ago.

Between 100 to 300 feet across, it has something like a 1.5% chance of striking earth in 2032. Anything larger than 150 feet with a 1% chance of impact gets put on the watch list of the International Asteroid Warning Network.

An asteroid that size could easily cause something as significant as the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908, estimated at 1000X the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb.

And still not remotely close to the Chicxulub impactor at the end of the Cretaceous. When it struck the Yucatan, the 10 – 15 kilometer meteor caused a rim of mountains higher than the Himalayas to form around the impact zone, blasted debris that achieved escape velocity and left the atmosphere, and brought instantaneous extinction as far away as what is now North Dakota and New Jersey.

NASA (funding pending) and Jet Propulsion Labs, among others, will follow YR4’s progress. If they upgrade this current threat, presumably some half-baked plan ensues to mitigate damage. I have personally volunteered Makerbot – the youngest, spryest, least whiny bastard – to lead Space Force on that dangerous mission.

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Ring of Fire

“Ring of Fire” eclipse drops tomorrow.
Nashville – the center of the universe – only gets a 50% eclipse from about 10:30am to 1:30pm, with a peak at noon.

The full experience passes right through Roswell, so I’m pretty sure that this is the mother ship coming to get us. I’ll see you onboard.

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The Wilhelm Scream

It’s positively ubiquitous! According to Gizmodo …

The sound effect that’s been heard in countless movies and TV shows over the decades technically has two birthdays. As a sound itself, it originally debuted in the 1951 film Distant Drums from singer-songwriter Sheb Wooley. But it was officially given its name with the minor character of Private Wilhelm in The Charge at Feather River, a western that came out July 11, 1953. In that movie, Wilhelm (played by actor Ralph Brooks) screams after being shot in the thigh with an arrow, which would come to define its use: in all of its appearances in future media, it would be used when someone got shot, blasted back by an explosion, or fell from a high distance.

Recently, CBS News did a story on the Wilhelm Scream, and the outlet revealed that it managed to find a tape with the first recording session Wooley did for the scream. CalArts researcher Craig Smith explained to CBS that he found the tape among many from the archives of the University of Southern California’s film school that were close to being trashed.

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High In The Sky . . .

. . . is what you would have to be to come up with this.

Inversion is building earth-orbiting capsules to deliver goods anywhere in the world from outer space. To make that a reality, Inversion’s capsule will come through the earth’s atmosphere at about 25 times as fast as the speed of sound . . .

Inversion aims to develop a four-foot-diameter capsule carrying a payload equivalent to the size of a few carry-on suitcases by 2025.

And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries — like delivering a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.

As you might imagine, there has been no shortage of venture capital to bolster this vision. Story here.

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More Space Junk

I’m convinced that someday the mother ship is coming for me, so I like to scan spaceward. The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the sky, and Spot the Station provides an excellent resource for following it. I plugged in the hometown and got this:

In addition to the ISS, it’s important to watch the planets. The Hubble Telescope takes photos every year (monitoring Jupiter’s monolith, presumably) and recently uncovered excitement on Saturn:

“In the northern hemisphere of Saturn, it was early autumn when Hubble took this year’s look at the ringed planet. A mysterious six-sided hurricane has reappeared around the planet’s north pole. The storm, big enough to swallow four Earths, was first spotted by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Last year it was hard to see but this year it has reappeared.

Farther out, it’s springtime on Uranus . . .”