Astronomy / Space Sloane DSS asteroid visualisation

[Cody]

A cool visualisation of the orbital motions of over 100,000 asteroids.

 

[Rog]

Wow. Cool, yet also terrifying - there's a lot of rock chunks out there, just waiting to thump into our teeny planet.

 

[metatheurgist]

Wow. Cool, yet also terrifying - there's a lot of rock chunks out there, just waiting to thump into our teeny planet.

And yet there are still elected officials that say the space program is a waste of money.

 

[Patrick_68000]

Nice video. . Parker said this animation took — from start to finish — 20 hours to render on 8 CPUs.

 

[Dejay]

Wow. Cool, yet also terrifying - there's a lot of rock chunks out there, just waiting to thump into our teeny planet.

Makes you wonder how save and chaotic a real asteroid field would be? The risk of something crashing into you at high speeds etc.
In the alpha footage the fields are somewhat peaceful almost like a forest. But they would be very dangerous in reality, right? Lots of motion and collisions, or do these get dampened out after a while?

 

[Yaffle]

Makes you wonder how save and chaotic a real asteroid field would be? The risk of something crashing into you at high speeds etc.
In the alpha footage the fields are somewhat peaceful almost like a forest. But they would be very dangerous in reality, right? Lots of motion and collisions, or do these get dampened out after a while?

It's more diffuse in reality, so safer:

"Even with more than one-half million asteroids known (and there are probably many more), they are still much more widely separated than sometimes seen in Hollywood movies: on average, their separation is in excess of 1-3 million km (depending on how one calculates it)."

From - http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Asteroids&Display=OverviewLong

 

[metatheurgist]

Appropriate comic:

http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0996.html