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Re: (meteorobs) Doomsday Icarus

Kevin posted:
Its just a shame that this is all the lay people see. Here on TV in NY the
media even created animation showing an asteroid coming in and hitting
where... of course - NYC !  As the "camera" pulls back you see a nice 
crater
enveloping all of the city, all of New Jersey (sorry Wayne, you're gone 
too)
and it probably gets you too Lew. 

There's no way to fight this. In the age of sensationalism there's nothing
that can be done on a large enough scale to combat this. I can see it  - 
for
weeks thet'll be jokes about it on Jay Leno, et al.

The same type of thing happens when the doom & gloom weathermen warn of 
killer
hurricanes, everyone runs scared and if it changes course it becomes a big
joke. The next time you hear of dozens dead because they ignored the 
warnings.

My feeling is that this report should never have been released this far in
advance in the first place. Now all the scientists have to go back on TV 
all
red faced admitting an error. Its just not good.

Kevin

Careful, Kevin, you are confusing 2 things here...one was the crap from the 
russian about Icarus, and the other is the 1997 XF11 imbroglio. THe Icarus 
garbage was dispensed of rather quickly.
	However, you do raise som,e interesting points regarding how the 
CBAT/JPL prcess with 1997XF11 came down. In actuality, what happened was 
pretty much by the book. Brian released the first notice, with the 
preliminary close pass of .0003 AU...and specifically reqested more 
observations and a search for past appartitions based on the preliminary 
orbital elements. That served it's purpose (from a scientific point of 
view)...within hours (!) that notice had led to a search that revealed the 
1990 images. With the 1990 images, the orbit became much more accurate and 
also shifted...so the original notice served it's purpose in extracting 
that old data. It would not have been looked for if the first circular had 
not come out.
	That does leave a major question though..dot since the original pass by 
distance (sorry I'll use miles here...the point is the same) was to be 30,
000 +/- 180,000 miles. The new one is 600,000 miles (I have seen no error 
bars on this so far). We still need to explain how 30,000 + 180,000 (I 
think that makes 210,000) became 600,000. In other words, the error on the 
first orbit does not include where the revised number comes out. So why 
were the error bars not large enough??
	As far as the media, they did real well for the first 24 hours or so, 
when all they did was report the CBAT/MPC facts. After then, of course, 
they had time to muck with the facts. BTW, that video you saw (on ABC I 
think Kevin) came from the Discovery channel's 3 minutes to impact, which 
did have an animation whacking that puppy on RT 287 between your home and 
the NJAA :->. I think that's why they used it..dot it was already available.
	It was also nice to see some faces attached to the names we know so 
well... Jim Scotti, Brian Marsden, Don Yeomans. I even saw the Columbia 
University Astronomer who completely blew the Nov 17th fireball 
(remember..dot it was in the early evening, yet he called it a Leonid), so now 
I know where to write to straighten him out about that! (Looks like he's an 
ABC TV favorite, since that's where he reappeared). Even he handled this 
OK. 
	I guess it might have been better if the first IAUC had been a bit 
more private to keep the machinations of science from misleading the public,
 but the fact is that is how science works. It's not perfect all the time, 
and you attempt to get more and better data to refine the predictions and 
theories. And while the hype was pretty extensive, I don't think it was as 
bad as it could have been.
	And it lead to the great NY POst headline this morning...I can't 
recall the 2nd word exactly, but it was something like..

Kiss our Asteroid Goodbye.

It was worth it:-> Besides, the issue is now a bit more in the public eye, 
although the conspiracists will have a field day. From a point of view it 
looks fishy....from those that do it all the time, that's just how science 
works.

Ouch! fELL OFF MY SOAPBOX.

Wayne
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