[Interview+] What Would It Take to Catch Up With a Meteorite?
Earth is hit by meteorites every day. Some are harmless, some could be dangerous. But now we have the most advanced tool to discover and predict them, the Vera Rubin Observatory. Will it be enough to predict a hit with enough precision to catch up a meteorite mid-flight? Finding out in this interview.
👉 NOIRLab Interview https://youtu.be/VKrpJODdEM0
🟣 Guest: Ian Chow https://ia-chow.github.io/
📜 Predictions of Imminent Earth Impactors Discovered by LSST https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05587
00:00 Intro
01:54 Working with Vera Rubin
04:33 Early detections
14:12 How can we improve
18:20 Big threats
22:00 New method to identify asteroids
27:43 Amateur observations
31:52 Current obsessions
33:08 Final thoughts
Comments (10)
Where could an amateur astronomer find data to help do follow on observations?
Man, I was flying my airbus about a month ago when that fireball over Germany went off. That clearly was one of the scary episodes of my pilot career even though I later confirmed I was at least 100 nm away. Also it def looked like exploding much lower than our flight level (380)
Since Earth is ~ 71 % water, about how many fall into the oceans ? Are there any plans for ocean recovery? Seems there are more in ocean than on the surface of the Earth.
Avi Loeb tried to recover fragments of one off the coast of New Guinea that was interstellar. I haven't seen any certain results yet if what he found was actually the meteorite fragments.
One problem with detecting an imminent impactor is that if its "moving right at you" it won't be a streak but a brightening dot.
That wouldn't happen as the Earth and approaching objects are following curved paths, influenced by the sun's gravity, and not straight lines.
Ian, why don’t you just distribute small swarms of camera drones around the world that’ll work together to locate a record the impacts. Hook them up to a central database linked to the warnings from Vera Rubin. The drones could automatically take to the skies and upload their images to the database in real time if they are equipped with a Starlink terminal.
Are you going to pay for that idea? $$$
You do realize that it is called a meteor until it hits the earth. Then it is a meteorite.
No. This scientist and 20+year space reporter did not know that. Thanks for educating them!