Celestial probabilities…….with some background for all them who do not understand nucleation events: where nothing survives, where Everything changes.
A comet on a million-year-long journey from the outer limits of the Solar System could very well crash into Mars on its first-ever trip inside the orbital paths of the inner planets. Space.com reported Oct. 13 that Comet Siding Spring, also known as C/2013 A1, will just barely miss the Red Planet.
Astronomers are excited, to say the least. Comet Siding Spring was discovered just last year and its trajectory through the Solar Sysem tracked and prognosticated. And by astronomical standards, Comet C/2013 A1 will pass dangerously close to Mars.
The comet will miss the Red Planet by just 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) at 2:27 p.m. EDT (1827 GMT) on Sunday. In comparison, the Moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 239,000 miles (384,600 km).
But there is a chance that the tracked trajectory of the comet could be wrong. Comet Siding Spring, which was named after the observatory that discovered it, could easily slam into Mars. Mathematically speaking, just a slight variance in angle and attitude could be the difference between the near miss of fourth planet and meeting the rust-red world in a mid-space collision.
So what are the odds that the comet will actually make a lasting impact on Mars? About 1 in 2000.
“There is a small but non-negligible chance that Comet 2013 A1 will strike Mars in October 19,” Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says, according to UFO Sighting Hotspot. “Current solutions put the odds of impact at 1 in 2000.”
Still, relatively speaking, Mars is safe enough from an actual collision. Astronomers, not to mention a small flotilla of NASA spacecraft, should get to see a great show, though.
It is estimated that Comet C/2013 A1 was formed about 4.6 billion years ago and has been part of the massive asteroidal/cometary belt that surrounds the Solar System, the Oort Cloud, ever since. It is also estimated that a direct impact with Mars' backside would produce an explosion at somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion megatons of TNT. To compare, the Chicxulub Meteor, the massive asteroid that slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago and was the primary factor in the demise of the dinosaurs, impacted with the force of 100 trillion tons of TNT (or 100 million megatons), according to LiveScience, more than a billion times more than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. |
