Nice simulation of an asteroid hitting earth
 

Fabulous video, Thanks for sharing.

One just safely passed us a few days ago

OK, I'm a low tech idiot: how does one
get that to play? I see a blank screen on
right and I click on stuff, but nothing happens.

The page should have given you a choice of which player to use.
After you make the choice it starts on it's own.

Barry, Got it!
On the 4th or 5th reload, up popped that option...before
I was just getting a "speed selection" which got me nowhere.

Amazing vid!
Thanks,
mD

Anytime ole man:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Do we have defensive measures for something that big? ala armageddon.

That is not an asteroid...that thing is the size of a small planet!!

The one that they say killed most life on the planet (including the dinosaurs) 65 million years ago was probably about 2% the size of that one.

Deep Impact was the better movie of the two. :) Check out the movies section of the Bad Astronomy web site. Like Eric5273 pointed out, the "rock" in that video is nearly the size of Mercury. The good news is that our solar system is fairly mature and anything that size is either in a stable solar orbit or has been captured by one of the larger planets as a "moon". The bad news is(as Eric5273 also pointed out), getting hit by a smaller rock can be pretty bad.

NASA's NEAT is an ongoing project to identify and track all the asteroids that cross Earth orbit. That's why we were aware of the "close call" last week. I don't think that there are any real "defense" plans other than early identification of a threat. The only viable defense would be to attempt to alter the trajectory very early on when it would only take a slight change to make the rock miss us.

The movie plot of blowing up the asteroid(or comet as in Deep Impact) is a really bad plan - especially at the terminal end near Earth. This is well explained in the movies section of the Bad Astronomy site above. Basically, it can't be done and, if it could, then it wouldn't change the outcome. It's the impact of the total mass that matters. Also, it's better to have one large trackable rock than one thousand smaller ones.