DRACONID METEOR OUTBURST: On October 8th, Earth will pass through a network of dusty filaments shed by Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. Forecasters expect the encounter to produce anywhere from a few dozen to a thousand meteors per hour visible mainly over Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The meteors will stream from the northern constellation Draco--hence their name, the "Draconids."
Peak rates should occur between 1600 UT and 2200 UT (noon - 6 pm EDT) as Earth grazes a series of filaments nearly intersecting our planet's orbit. Analysts at the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office prepared this plot showing how the meteor rate is likely to vary:
If the maximum around 1900 UT reaches 1000 meteors per hour, the 2011 Draconids will be classified as a full-fledged meteor storm. The question is, will anyone see it? Bright moonlight over Europe, Africa and the Middle East will reduce the number of visible meteors 2- to 10-fold. The situation is even worse in North America where the shower occurs in broad daylight.
One way to enjoy the Draconids, no matter where you live, is to listen to them. The Air Force Space Surveillance Radar will be scanning the skies over the USA during the shower. When a Draconid passes through the radar beam--ping!--there will be an echo. Tune in to Space Weather Radio for live audio.
In Europe, an international team of scientists plans to observe the shower from airplanes flying at ~30,000 feet where the thin air reduces the impact of lunar glare. In Bishop, California, a team of high school students will launch an experimental helium balloon to higher altitudes, 100,000 feet or more, where the sky is black even at noon. Cameras in the balloon's payload might catch some Draconid fireballs during the peak hours of the outburst.
Stay tuned for updates as Earth approaches the debris zone.
The Draconid (Giacobinid) meteor shower may have spasms of strong activity during good observing hours for Europe or possibly elsewhere. Various predictions put one or more outbursts between about 17:00 and 21:00 Universal Time (GMT). The shower's radiant is near the head of Draco, but the meteors themselves can flash into view anywhere in the sky. Unfortunately, the light of the waxing gibbous Moon will obscure all but the brightest meteors. See our article, A Mad Dash for the Draconids.
The bright eclipsing variable star Algol in Perseus should be in one of its periodic dimmings, magnitude 3.4 instead of its usual 2.1, for a couple hours centered on 7:49 p.m. EDT. Algol takes several additional hours to fade and to rebrighten.
Mission Don Quijote: Blow up huge asteroid hurtling toward Earth and see if it will change course.
Sounds just like the movie Armageddon, right? In fact it has the same plot line just not the famous faces or the stuntmen. Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Liv Tyler won’t be major cast members of the European Space Agency’s plot. Instead the main players will potentionally be 99942 Apophis, a 1600ft-wide asteroid, Hildalgo, a 500kg impact craft, and Sancho, an orbitor that will analyze data from the impact.
According to the Daily Mail, the European Space Agency is planning the real version of Armageddon for 2015 when Mission: Don Quijote, “will see a satelllite fired at break-neck speed into a ‘test’ asteroid to see if its course changes.”
99942 Apophis, the 1600ft-wide asteriod, has a one in 250,000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, according to experts. If a big asteroid were to make contact, or in more accurate terms, hurtle its fiery wrath at us, it could and probably would wipe out life on Earth. The plan for the EU Space Agency is to send up Hildalgo and have it collide with Apophis at a speed of around six miles a second. Sancho will cruise around the area scanning the collision and monitoring whether the asteriod changes direction.
“ESA’s Don Quijote is an asteroid deflection precursor mission concept, designed to assess and validate the technology that one day could be used to deflect an asteroid threatening the Earth…,” says the neo space mission preparation for the European Space Agency.
What do you think about the ESA’s Don Quijote mission?
I’ve been scratching my head for a long time, trying to figure out why NASA hasn’t been taking the idea of preventing asteroid impacts seriously. This idea has everything you’d want in a project: it’s cool (I mean, c’mon, we’re talking asteroid impacts!), it’s doable, it’s not terribly expensive, it’s already on the public’s mind thanks to Hollywood, and there’s always the eensy-weensy possibility that you might save all of humanity.0
Yet, despite this, it’s been an uphill battle to get NASA to pay attention. While the space agency has been very good about supporting early detection programs, the support for a space mission to prevent an impact has been lacking. Of course, given their relatively small budget (<1% of the federal spending) I imagine taking on anything like this would be difficult.
So I’m pretty chuffed that the European Space Agency is looking into saving our collective skins. They’ve being studying the feasibility of a mission to test methods of asteroid impact mitigation, including a very very cool space mission they’ve dubbed Don Quijote (first proposed in 2002, and may launch sometime after 2020). It’s actually two separate spacecraft: one to impact a small near-Earth asteroid, and another to monitor the event carefully to see what happens, including how much the orbit of the asteroid was changed.
The idea here isn’t complicated: if we see an asteroid on an impact trajectory with Earth, we want to change the orbit so it doesn’t hit us. We could try blowing it up, but that’s actually a bad idea: at best it creates a lot of debris that can still smack into us, some of which may still be big enough to do us serious harm. So a better idea is to make sure it doesn’t hit us at all.
Impacting an incoming asteroid is a good way to do this. It probably won’t shatter the rock, and if done with enough advance time the orbit can be changed enough to prevent an impact with Earth. Think of it this way: imagine you’re crossing the street. If you see a car really close, you have to move quickly, but if it’s far away you can take your time. If you have enough lead time, even a small change in the car’s velocity can make the difference between a hit and miss. Slamming a space probe into an asteroid changes its velocity, and if it changes enough we’d prevent an impact.
The problem is we’ve never tried this, so it’s not clear how big an impact you need. Don Quijote would be a big step toward that goal. By making extremely precise measurements of the impact and the change in the asteroid’s velocity (which may be impossible to do from the ground due to the tiny orbital changes made) we can get a handle on how well we can do this.
One recent paper published looked into what sort of instruments would be needed to achieve the goals of the mission. They looked at deflecting two different asteroids; they have different sizes (320 vs. 680 meters in diameter), masses, and orbits as well: one is on a more elliptical orbit making it harder to get to but easier to deflect, and the other on a more circular orbit that’s easier to get to and harder to deflect. This study helps clarify what equipment will need to be built to do all this, and is a great step toward understanding what must be done.
Mind you, NASA did something like this back in 2005 with the Deep Impact mission, but there the primary goal wasn’t seeing how much the orbit of a comet was changed after an impactor whacked it, but instead to try to dig up surface material and see what lay beneath. Also, comets vent material which changes their orbit all the time, making it difficult to know just how much of a difference Deep Impact made. Don Quijote would avoid that by hitting an inert rock.
I certainly hope the ESA continues to fund this project, and that it eventually gets the green light. I would love to see something like this happening soon. It’s pretty unlikely that an asteroid big enough to really hurt us will be spotted in the next few years, but the thing is, one will eventually turn up. While it may not be tonight, over the next few decades the odds go up considerably. Since it generally takes many years for a mission to get from an idea to launch — and many more to get to its target and do what needs to be done — the sooner we get started on this the better.
Image credit: ESA – AOES Medialab. Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Smithsonian Magazine.
Will We Be Able to Deflect an Earthbound Asteroid?
Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 16 August 2011 Time: 12:19 PM ET
Artist's concept of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the early Earth. An impact with a 500 kilometer (310 mile) diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet. The Earth may have experienced such gigantic impacts in its youth, but fortunately today there are no projectiles this large to threaten our planet. CREDIT: Don Davis/NASA
For any single human being, there are bigger things to worry about than death by space rock. For the long-term survival of humankind, on the other hand, asteroids pose a real danger.
A 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck off the coast of present-day Mexico 65 million years ago induced ecological changes that wiped out the dinosaurs. Inevitably, an Earth-shaking chunk of space debris will strike again.
Will it be too late by then?
However, so many earthly worries exist that a cosmic one which, at any given moment, is infinitesimally small doesn't garner much attention — or government funding. Several scientists who study asteroid hazards agree: Humankind probably won't start readying its planetary defenses until we know the danger is real. We'll need evidence that a large asteroid is actually headed here. [When Space Attacks: 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts on Earth]
It depends. "Human beings can solve any technical problems that are put in front of us," said Daniel Durda, senior planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and an expert on asteroid collisions. "It's the social and political issues that we struggle with." Rusty Schweickart, former NASA astronaut and founding member of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the Earth from asteroid strikes, concurred: "The geopolitical realities are daunting. The technical issues are easy by comparison."
The asteroid Apophis was discovered on June 19, 2004. It will fly within 18,300 miles of Earth on April 13, 2029, but poses little risk of impact. CREDIT: UH/IA
Though we know very little about the composition of asteroids — necessary information for determining their masses, and knowing how to knock them off course — we do know where most of the large, nearby rocks actually are. NASA's Spaceguard Survey tracks the paths of all near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in Earth's neighborhood that are larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter. [The 7 Strangest Asteroids In The Solar System]
Knowing an asteroid's location is step one in determining if it's on a crash course for Earth, and fortunately, none of the big ones pose a threat at this time. If one of these known asteroids were found to have a greater than 1 percent chance of striking Earth, astronomers would figure it out at least a decade beforehand.
"A large impact of something 1 km across — that's a bad enough scenario that it would motivate people to take this seriously," Durda said. According to Clark Chapman, another senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, the international community would probably band together and plan a mission to divert the path of the asteroid. "This would probably require matching its orbit with a series of spacecraft equipped with bombs," Chapman said. Getting the deflection mission off the ground would cost on the order of $10 billion.
Though we don't have all the technology worked out yet, we do know how to build nuclear devices, and we have already successfully sent spacecraft to and from asteroids. "A decade out, given the technology it would take to do a deflection, I think we could respond in time," Durda told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.
David Morrison, interim director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and an expert on impact hazards, thinks we might need more time. He believes it would take two missions to deflect an asteroid. The first would rendezvous with the target asteroid and figure out what it's made of, the second, which would be specially tailored to the asteroid based on the first mission, to knock it off course. "One decade would be the minimum, but that would mean sending the deflection mission before we had characterized the target, which would be a bit risky. Twenty years is more realistic as a minimum," Morrison wrote in an email.
Schweickart says 15 years of warning of a coming impact would be a safe bet. Along with the time it takes to assemble a launch vehicle, launch, fly to and rendezvous with an asteroid, you also need "time enough for the deflection itself to accumulate enough change in the [asteroid] orbit for it to miss the Earth impact. Post deflection will require anywhere from say 3 to 10 years for the orbit change."
Smaller targets
There are dangers involved with asteroids under the 1-kilometer threshold, however.
"Anything more than 300 to 400 meters (983-1,312 feet) in diameter can cause continental-scale damage," said Stephen Wolters, a research fellow at Caltech who studies near-Earth asteroids at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA has begun locating and tracking smaller asteroids, but there are thousands still at large. If one of these were on course to strike Earth, sky surveys would give us no more than a month of warning. In that case, said Morrison, deflection is probably not an option. Instead, "you respond more like the way we handle hurricane warnings," evacuating people from the area most likely to be struck.
Eventually we will track all asteroids larger than about 200 meters (656 feet) wide. The day scientists realize that one of these mid-size rocks has a chance of hitting us, and that we have enough time to do something about it, serious political strife will likely ensue, the experts say. [Will Asteroid Apophis Hit Earth in 2036? NASA Rejects Russian Report]
Uncertainties abound
"If we had a decade of warning on a smaller-scale asteroid, 200 meters across, I think that's down in the area where we would be much more prone to arguing about possibilities and we wouldn't actually respond to it," Durda said.
Such an asteroid collision probably wouldn't cause a global catastrophe, just a national or continental one, he explained. This means that perhaps not every country would care to pitch in to deflect it, and others might be opposed to any action if it puts them at greater risk.
"The big challenge will be the international implications of where it will occur, what the range is — usually orbital uncertainties mean there's a track across the Earth where it's most likely to hit," he said. "Then, if you decide to deflect the asteroid, where does that track move across the Earth's surface before movingoff the surface? Now you're taking an act of God and turning it into an act of litigation, where you've moved the impact point potentially into countries that had been safe."
He continued, "It's these very issues that will lead to all kinds of discussion and argument and inherent delay in taking any physical action."
Given orbital uncertainties, another issue is how probable an impact must be before we decide to take action. "The world economies cannot afford to protect against all low-probability hazards," Chapman said. A 1-in-1,000 chance of a collision, for example, will probably be ignored, and according to Schweickart, they already are. "There are already some near-Earth objects with impact probabilities greater than 1-in-1000 and no one is the least excited," he wrote in an email. A 130-meter-wide NEA called 2009FD, for example, has a 1-in-435 chance of impacting Earth in the year 2185.
"For [the case] of a 500-meter-wide near-Earth asteroid, at a probability of more than 1 percent, I think we would take the threat very seriously," Morrison wrote. "Below that I don't know."[The Greatest Mysteries of the Asteroid Belt]
Out of left field
There's one form of cosmic debris that no amount of international cooperation can do much about.
"There's always a possibility of a long-period comet coming from nowhere and giving us almost no warning," Wolters said. Not only do such bodies come from the outer reaches of the solar system, where we can't see them, "these comets can come from high inclination orbits where we're not looking for things. You might only have a few months notice."
The New Zealand area is having a swarm of quakes that, layer-upon-layer seem to be never-ending. The assault on their area of the globe seems to be something that is continuous with very few breaks between swarms. What might be the cause of these quakes and how much have the continents moved due to the uptick in seismic activity?
What might be the cause of the uptick in earthquakes around the globe? Here is a paper that has an interesting theory on the subject. Take a quick read of this excerpt and tell me what you think.
In other words, this paper talks about Comet Elenin, planetary alignment, and other astrological events that are a possible cause for the uptick in seismic activity. What do you think?
ARE YOU PREPARED?
THIS IS FROM THE CDC WEBSITE INDICATING WHAT YOU SHOULD DO/HAVE IN CASE OF AN EARTHQUAKE.
Emergency Supplies for Earthquake Preparedness
Stock up now on emergency supplies that can be used after an earthquake. These supplies should include a first aid kit, survival kits for the home, automobile, and workplace, and emergency water and food. Store enough supplies to last at least 3 days.
First Aid Kit
Store your first aid supplies in a tool box or fishing tackle box so they will be easy to carry and protected from water. Inspect your kit regularly and keep it freshly stocked. NOTE: Important medical information and most prescriptions can be stored in the refrigerator, which also provides excellent protection from fires.
Drugs/Medications
Hydrogen peroxide to wash and disinfect wounds
Antibiotic ointment
Individually wrapped alcohol swabs
Aspirin and non-aspirin tablets
Prescriptions and any long-term medications (keep these current)
Diarrhea medicine
Eye drops
Dressings
Bandage strips
Ace bandages
Rolled gauze
Cotton-tipped swabs
Adhesive tape roll
Other First Aid Supplies
First aid book
Scissors
Tweezers
Thermometer
Bar soap
Tissues
Sunscreen
Paper cups
Pocket knife
Small plastic bags
Safety pins
Needle and thread
Instant cold packs for sprains
Sanitary napkins
Splinting materials
Survival Kit for Your Home
Assemble a survival kit for your home with the following items:
Tools and supplies
ax, shovel, broom
screwdriver, pliers, hammer, adjustable wrench
rope for towing or rescue
plastic sheeting and tape
Items for safety and comfort
sturdy shoes that can provide protection from broken glass, nails, and other debris
gloves (heavy and durable for cleaning up debris)
candles
waterproof matches
change of clothing
knife
garden hose (for siphoning and firefighting)
tent
recreational supplies for children and adults
blankets or sleeping bags
portable radio, flashlight, and extra batteries
essential medications and eyeglasses
fire extinguisher -- multipurpose, dry chemical type
food and water for pets
toilet tissue
cash
Survival Kit for Your Automobile
Assemble a survival kit for your automobile with the following items. Storing some of these supplies in a small bag or backpack will make them more convenient to carry if you need to walk.
Blankets
Bottled water
Change of clothes
Coins for telephone calls
Fire extinguisher -- multipurpose, dry chemical type
First aid kit and manual
Emergency signal device (light sticks, battery-type flasher, reflector, etc.)
It starts out innocently enough: a small speck against a field of background stars, barely noticeable in the image data. But… it’s a speck that wasn’t there before. Subsequent images confirm its existence – there’s something out there. Something bright, something large, and it’s moving through our solar system very quickly. The faint blur indicates that it’s a comet, an icy visitor from the outermost reaches of the solar system. And it’s headed straight toward Earth.
Exhaustive calculations are run and re-run. Computer simulations are executed. All possibilities are taken into consideration, and yet there’s no alternative to be found; our world will face a close encounter with a comet in mere months’ time. Phone calls are made, a flurry of electronic messages fly between computer terminals across the world, consultations are held with top experts in the field. We are unprepared… what can we do? What does this mean for civilization as we know it? What will this speeding icy bullet from outer space do to our planet?
The answer? Nothing.
Nothing at all. In fact, it probably won’t even be very interesting to look at – if you can evenfind it when it passes by.
(Sorry for the let-down.)
There’s been a lot of buzz in the past several months regarding Comet Elenin, a.k.a. C/2010 X1, which was discovered by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin on December 10, 2010. Elenin spotted the comet using a telescope in New Mexico remotely from his location in Lyubertsy, Russia. At that time it was about 647 million kilometers (401 million miles) from Earth… in the time since it has closed the distance considerably, and is now around 270 million km away. Elenin is a long-period comet, which means it has a rather large orbit around the Sun… it comes in from a vast distance, swings around the Sun and heads back out to the depths of the solar system – a round trip lasting over 10,000 years. During its current trip it will pass by Earth on October 16, coming as close as 35 million km (22 million miles).
Elenin's orbit via the JPL Small-Body Database Browser
Yes, 22 million miles.
That’s pretty far.
Way too far for us to be affected by anything a comet has to offer. Especially a not-particularly-large comet like Elenin.
Some of the doomy-gloomy internet sites have been mentioning the size of Elenin as being 80,000 km across. This is a scary, exaggerated number that may be referring to the size of Elenin’s coma – a hazy cloud of icy particles that surrounds a much, much smaller nucleus. The coma can be extensive but is insubstantial; it’s akin to icy cigarette smoke. Less than that, in fact… a comet’s coma and tail are even more of a vacuum than can be reproduced in a lab on Earth! In reality most comets have a nucleus smaller than 10km…that’s less than a billionth the mass of Earth (and a far cry from 80,000 km.) We have no reason to think that Elenin is any larger than this – it’s most likely smaller.
Ok, but how about the gravitational and/or magnetic effect of a comet passing by Earth? That’s surely got to do something, right? To Earth’s crust, or the tides? For the answer to that, I will refer to Don Yeomans, a researcher at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL:
“Comet Elenin will not only be far away, it is also on the small side for comets. And comets are not the most densely-packed objects out there. They usually have the density of something akin to loosely packed icy dirt,” said Yeomans. “So you’ve got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers. It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean’s tides than comet Elenin ever will.”
“It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean’s tides than comet Elenin ever will.”
– Don Yeomans, NASA / JPL
And as far as the effect from Elenin’s magnetic field goes… well, there is no effect. Elenin, like all comets, doesn’t have a magnetic field. Not much else to say there.
Today, June 10, 2011, is six months since the discovery of the first comet in the modern history of Russia. During this time our knowledge about the comet has greatly changed. In the first days after the comet’s discovery, the comet’s orbit did not inspire interest;C/2010 X1 (Elenin) was going to be a faint comet, visible only to telescopes equipped with CCD cameras. But after only the first week of observations, hope was growing that this comet might have a close perihelion, which was later confirmed.
Now we know that the comet will come practically as close as the orbit of Mercury to the Sun and will possibly become visible to the unaided eye. It is unlikely to become a Great Comet, but for me, as its discoverer, it has already become a momentous event. My dreams of many years have been realized.
During the last six months the comet has aroused a lot of interest among the people of the Earth; among the huge number of letters about the end of the world, I also received those about people who became interested in astronomy and observing, who bought telescopes and discovered for themselves the beauty of the night sky. This is possibly the most important effect caused by my comet. Of course the comet poses no threat to the Earth and all the rumors will end when it starts moving away from the Earth and Sun. The same thing happened with the famous comet Hale-Boppand will be repeated more than once in the future.
I ran the calculations of the orbit for the period from 2011 to 15,000. Of course, in such a long time interval, the accuracy of the calculations will be limited but quite acceptable for a general understanding of the orbital parameters of Comet C/2010 X1. At aphelion the comet will be ~1030 AU from the Sun and will not return toward the Sun until the 8th century of the 14th millennium…
What if we replace comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) by brown dwarf with mass about 0.05 of Solar mass? This video demonstrate time interval from 2000 to 2020 years. As you can see, dramatic changes in the orbit of Saturn would have started 3 years ago. But at this time all planets are on it’s nominal orbits. I think myth about “brown dwarf instead comet Elenin” is debunked. You can see that by yourself.
Numerical integration was carried out by ORSA software using RADAU15-th order integrator.
While it’s not unusual for a fresh comet from the outer solar system like Elenin to brighten early on and then stall or not live up to expectations – think of Comet Kohoutek – let’s hope the comet still has some fresh ice and dust left for a good show.
This photo of Comet Kohoutek was taken on January 11, 1974. Although the comet did become visible with the naked eye, it never reached brightness predictions, disappointing an expectant public. Credit: NASA
In the case of Kohoutek, which graced our skies in late 1973, astronomers believed it was making its first trip to the inner solar system and carried a full complement of highly volatile ices. When exposed to the sun after so many thousands of years in the deep chill of deep space, its ices were expected to vaporize like crazy and loft lots of dust from Kohoutek’s interior into space to create a spectacular tail and brilliant coma. Such rosy predictions never came to pass. When Kohoutek failed to fill the bill, its name quickly became a worldwide joke. Even today, I still hear the occasional “sounds like another Kohoutek” when someone refers to an astronomical event that didn’t live up to expectations.
Comet Elenin recently resumed its normal eastward motion against the stars as it moves through the constellation Leo in the coming month. The tick marks show the comet's position every five days. Credit: Created with Chris Marriott's SkyMap software
We won’t pass judgement so swiftly on Elenin. Comets are sometimes unpredictable. That’s what gives them their charm, and the reason I’ve tracked so many of them at every hour of the night over the years. I like surprises.
Currently Comet Elenin is moving eastward in the constellation Leo the Lion not far from its brightest star Regulus. It coma or cocoon of dust and gas that shrouds the nucleus measured some 62,000 miles across in late May. That sounds huge, but we’re talking the envelope around the actual comet, which is little more than a tiny spark of light buried deeply in the coma’s center. Scientists estimate the comet nucleus itself – what makes the coma - is a few miles in diameter.
The Event is a fictional NBC television show featuring a black U.S. President grappling with the national security problem of whether or not to tell the U.S. public about the existence of extraterrestrial life. Comet Elenin is a long-period body from the Oort cloud that is approaching the inner solar system and has been associated with major earthquake activity on Earth. What is the relationship between Comet Elenin and the Event? Perhaps nothing; or, maybe, a very lot indeed. For there is an important paradox surrounding Comet Elenin. The solution to the paradox may well have been revealed in the season finale of the Event. Were elements of the U.S. government using a fictional television show to break to the world public something with tremendous global significance that might soon unfold? Read on.
Even though Comet Elenin was only discovered in December 2010 by Russian amateur astronomer Leonid Elenin, its passage through the solar system could be tracked back to when it entered the solar system by a very useful orbiting tracking software that NASA's JPL makes freely available to the public. Something remarkable was found by a Bosnian earth scientist who tracked Elenin's orbital passage back to 2006. Dr Mensur Omerbashich found that Elenin was aligned with the Earth and other planets when major earthquakes had appeared. In a paper released on an online science archive, he outlines the most significant alignments featuring Elenin that he claims are linked to seismic activities on Earth.
The remarkable discovery by Dr Omerbashich suggests that Elenin was something very large, with an enormous mass and gravitational field to be able to influence seismic events on Earth from a very long distance going back as far as 2006. Elenin's size and mass could be even as big as brown dwarf star as some conspiracy theorists have been arguing has been secretly known to be approaching the inner solar system. In 1983, the Washington Post and New York Times published articles about a large mysterious planet X that could be a brown dwarf that was part of our solar system. According to some researchers, planet X was none other than the planet Nibiru revealed in the first published book by the recently deceased scholar of Sumerian history, Zecharia Sitchin.
Elenin Comet Heading For Earth And Continued UpdatesJune 18, 2011
In 1976, Sitchin wrote The 12th Planet (he included the moon and the sun as planets) which according to ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts was Nibiru, the home world of extraterrestrials called the Anunnaki. Nibiru or Planet X, was a long-period body that took 3600 years to revolve around our solar system. According to Sitchin, each time Nibiru/Planet X passed through our inner solar system, major destruction would occur to nearby planets. For some researchers, Elenin's seismic influence on Earth is a sign that it is Nibiru. Some go as far as claim that the name Elenin, is in fact a code for Extinction Level Event Nibiru is Near (ELENIN).
New Pictures of Elenin – Click Here, June – I will not post them here as they have copyright.
Today, June 10, 2011, is six months since the discovery of the first comet in the modern history of Russia. During this time our knowledge about the comet has greatly changed. In the first days after the comet’s discovery, the comet’s orbit did not inspire interest; C/2010 X1 (Elenin)was going to be a faint comet, visible only to telescopes equipped with CCD cameras. But after only the first week of observations, hope was growing that this comet might have a close perihelion, which was later confirmed.
Now we know that the comet will come practically as close as the orbit of Mercury to the Sun and will possibly become visible to the unaided eye. It is unlikely to become a Great Comet, but for me, as its discoverer, it has already become a momentous event. My dreams of many years have been realized.
During the last six months the comet has aroused a lot of interest among the people of the Earth; among the huge number of letters about the end of the world, I also received those about people who became interested in astronomy and observing, who bought telescopes and discovered for themselves the beauty of the night sky. This is possibly the most important effect caused by my comet. Of course the comet poses no threat to the Earth and all the rumors will end when it starts moving away from the Earth and Sun. The same thing happened with the famous comet Hale-Bopp and will be repeated more than once in the future.
I ran the calculations of the orbit for the period from 2011 to 15,000. Of course, in such a long time interval, the accuracy of the calculations will be limited but quite acceptable for a general understanding of the orbital parameters of Comet C/2010 X1. At aphelion the comet will be ~1030 AU from the Sun and will not return toward the Sun until the 8th century of the 14th millennium…
Elenin Enters Mars Orbit at the end of June, 2011, the 27th is the day.
Elenin is an average sized comet that was discovered by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin on December 10, 2010. It is also known as comet C/2010 X1. It is a long-period comet and takes about 10,000 years to complete one orbit around our Sun.
The most recent prediction is Elenin will be closest to Earth sometime in September. The exact trajectory of the comet still has some uncertainty.
There are many conspiracy theories regarding this comet.
Most scientists, of course, don’t believe that Comet Elenin has a strong enough magnetic field to have any effect on Earth.
“Comet Elenin will not only be far away, it is also on the small side for comets. And comets are not the most densely-packed objects out there. They usually have the density of something akin to loosely packed icy dirt,” said Yeomans. “So you’ve got a modest-sized icy dirtball that is getting no closer than 35 million kilometers. It will have an immeasurably miniscule influence on our planet. By comparison, my subcompact automobile exerts a greater influence on the ocean’s tides than comet Elenin ever will.” (Don Yeomans, NASA researcher)
I’m not saying I believe that the poles will shift and the Earth will end as it passes through the comet’s tail. But I’m not sure I would place all of my faith in scientists – after all, scientists have a bad habit of lacking imagination and an appreciation for the magic of the Universe.
Do you think that Elenin is something bigger than Scientists are making it out to be? Do you think there is too much hype around this comet? What about whether it is actually Niburu or Planet X or otherwise?
If this is something big, are you prepared? Have you done your basic preparedness for things like loss of job, earthquake, fire, flood, tornado, or other things in which you might need to use your preparedness skills and items?
Do you have a 72 hour kit? Do you have rotating food storage? Do you have water storage? Do you have a family preparedness plan in the case of fire, earthquake, or other emergency? I think that planning for the basic emergencies trumps going underground in a panic just in case a comet might hit earth.
Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images 
Stock up now on emergency supplies that can be used after an earthquake. These supplies should include a first aid kit, survival kits for the home, automobile, and workplace, and emergency water and food. Store enough supplies to last at least 3 days.
June 10th, 2011 | 
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