Event Details
Comets, Asteroids, Keyholes and Probable Earth Collisions
When: Tuesday May 24, 2011 (6:30PM - 8:30PM)
6:30PM to 7:00PM Refreshments/Networking hosted by SAE SoCal
7:00PM to 8:00PM Presentation
8:00PM to 8:30PM Q&A with Paul Chodas
Where: Kinesiology & Health Sciences Bldg
Room KHS Room 199 Lecture Hall
California State University, Fullerton
Parking:
From 57 Fwy, Exit Nutwood West, Turn rt .on N. State College Blvd
Turn rt Gymnasium Drive, turn rt at State College Parking Structure,
Proceed to end of building and park
Use Parking Permit Machine to purchase Daily permit ($ 8.00)
Comet and asteroid collisions with the Earth are good story lines in movies, but what are the real chances of such events? Chances are small that a sizeable object will impact the Earth over our lifetime, but the consequences of such a collision could be enormous, even possibly becoming a global catastrophe. NASA has established an office at JPL for coordinating the search for Near-Earth Objects that might threaten the Earth, compute precise trajectories for these objects, and for each, assessing the probability that it might impact the Earth over the next century. This talk will describe the efforts under way for detecting these objects, tracking them, and computing the impact risks. In 2008, the system operated flawlessly for a real asteroid impact scenario, a very small asteroid that impacted in the Nubian Desert of Sudan. Currently, there are 364 asteroids that have non-zero impact probabilities in our risk table, but none currently has an impact probability larger than a tenth of a percent.
Paul Chodas is a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he has worked for almost 30 years on the orbital dynamics of comets and asteroids. He developed much of the software that JPL uses for determining the orbits of asteroids and comets and estimating the probabilities that they may collide with the Earth. He was one of the first astronomers to predict that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 would impact Jupiter in 1994, and he predicted the impact times and locations for the worldwide community. Before that, Dr. Chodas was part of the Astrometry Network of the International Halley Watch, and helped determine the precise trajectory of Halley's comet. He was part of the team, which determined precise positions of asteroids Gaspra, Ida, and Mathilde for spacecraft encounters with these objects. His precision orbit prediction software remains an integral part of the process for observing and imaging asteroids using radar.
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