Damn... We could use a reset.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses
Anything except metric.
Do these school buses come with gun shots?
Would little craters that look like bullet impacts count?
Don’t see why not
This is the only unit of public transportation Americans will understand.
But what kind? Flat face? Oldschool? Short bus?
There are many sizes of school busses!
The twin peaks kind of school bus
Don't Look Up had the good ending, man this timeline sucks.
*Another
What's needed is a 24/7 space-based observation system, not rely on leftover observation time on telescopes and amateur aid. The near misses are rarely even close, and the sizes are small enough to at most endanger a small area, but it's a lesson that if there ever was a big one, we wouldn't even know or be able to do anything. Find the big ones very early, we might be able to change the future, but we won't find them with how we look now.
Let me introduce you to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
If I recall correctly a similar one was planned for the northern hemisphere but science is too expensive.
Yeah makes sense, but bilions and bilions on stupid unnecessary wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocents OBVIOUSLY isnt too expensive, no no. If you'll excuse me, have to ask for another 100 million from my sponsers to fund my political events that benefit no one but my own interests, ciao.
Now now, if we compare things to military budgets then a lot of things become ridiculously obvious...
it's a lesson that if there ever was a big one, we wouldn't even know or be able to do anything
This isn't really correct; near-Earth asteroids big enough to cause global catastrophe are much brighter than smaller asteroids like the one talked about in the article, so they're much easier to detect. We've already mapped the vast majority (over 90%) of >1km asteroids and most of the ones in the >140m range. If any of these were found to have a high probability of hitting Earth, we could send a redirection mission years ahead of time.
There are also (ground-based) systems like ATLAS which are monitoring the sky 24/7 and would likely provide a few days to weeks of advance warning for small to medium asteroids. That's too late to redirect the asteroid, but enough time to evacuate an area if necessary.
Large NEOs are very unlikely at this point for the reasons you've given. It's advanced warning on anything else that's needed. Redirection is another topic, but we have no experience and only theory on the best ways to do it, and wouldn't know which technique to try before a close examination (which means time to find it and get to it just to figure that out). As for advanced warning for evacuation, that's probably the most likely scenario, but it's also morbidly funny to mention in a thread discussing near misses found days before its passing, and often we see articles about the rock after the fact. (Although maybe it was known about before by experts, just didn't hit the press in time)
Sorry folks. Back to work.
/c/disappointingnews
Based on assumptions about how much light is reflected, 2026JH2 is currently estimated to be between 15 and 30 meters (49 and 98 feet) in diameter. At the smaller end of that range, Michel said, it would be similar in size to a bolide, or fireball, that exploded in the atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, shattering windows and injuring 1,000 people. At the highest end of the range, it would be closer in size to an object that exploded near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908, which pulverized large swaths of forest.
I find it amazing that doubling a small object’s size seems to a produce a non-linear increase in impact effect. The majority of the earth’s surface is water or sparsely inhabited, but something just 30 meters across has the effect of a low nuclear yield. A week’s worth of notice on one of these striking near a large city would be pretty chaotic.
With all the private space exploration gaining traction, it surprises me that there’s not more dedicated to detecting objects that intersect our trajectory.
If you double the diameter, the volume increases 8-fold, and also the mass.
Additionally, doubling the diameter results in doubling the surface area to volume ratio which increases the percentage of the mass that survives atmosphere entry.
Small ones will mostly ablate in the atmosphere. Bigger ones will still end up solid enough to come apart and either strike or explode above ground.
Shame
Dammit
By how many pygmy marmosets this time?