Statistics – Computation
Scientific paper
May 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dda....41.0603c&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #41, #6.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.931
Statistics
Computation
Scientific paper
On October 6, 2008, the small newly discovered near-Earth asteroid 2008 TC3 was found to be on an Earth-impacting trajectory, with impact less than 20 hours away. This was the first ever predicted impact of a near-Earth object. Fortunately, it was immediately clear that the object was only a few meters in size and would therefore almost certainly break up when it entered the Earth's atmosphere. We review the pre-impact orbit computations and predictions, the post-impact reconstructions of the trajectory, and the trajectory geometry. The first prediction of impact was made by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which quickly made the discovery and subsequent follow-up observations available to the astronomical community and contacted us at the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office. Our impact predictions indicated that the atmospheric entry would occur over northern Sudan around 02:46 UT on October 7. Over the course of the day, the number of observations sky-rocketed to several hundred, and the impact prediction uncertainty shrank to ±3 km. Topocentric parallax up to 15 degrees is present in the data and the rates of motion approached 13.4 arcsec/s prior to the object's disappearance into the Earth's umbra. Detections of the actual atmospheric impact event suggested that it was an airburst explosion at an altitude of 37 km with an energy equivalent of about one kiloton of TNT. The airburst occurred at 02:45:45 UT at about 32.2 East longitude and 20.8 North latitude, matching the final impact predictions to within 0.2 s in time and 1.5 km in position. We compute Monte Carlo clones of the final orbit to investigate possible source orbits. Trajectory dispersions remain fairly compact as far back as 1961 , when an Earth close approach at 0.18 ± 0.12 AU scatters the predictions. Only statistical characterizations of the earlier trajectory are possible.
Chesley Steve
Chodas Paul
Yeomans David
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