Bonilla’s ObservationWhen no one cared!

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ObservationMore than 400 Misty Objects in front of the Sun

August 12, 1883

Mexican Astronomer: José Bonilla

Saw 450 dark, unidentified objects crossing before the Sun

Each one surrounded by a glowing mist.

But no one else on Earth saw such a thing.

IMAGE PLACEHOLDER

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No One BelievedHis editor dismissed the phenomenon

iFlecks of Dust

iBugs Obscuring the Telescope

iUFOs

But the Horrifying Truth Was:

∠

The human race was gonna extinct.

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So What Was It?Shocking!!!

Fragments of a billion-ton comet

size from 50 to 800 meters across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the

scales at a billion tons or more

Passing within a few hundred kilometers of Earth

between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That’s just a hair’s breadth.

Each at least as big as the Tunguska object

So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.

How close Earth may have come to catastrophe

Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an

average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between

observations.

In 2011, National Autonomous University of

Mexico reanalyzed the observation

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Tunguska EventWhat happened?

• It is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history.

• Occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 07:14 KRAT (00:14 UT) on June 30, 1908.

• The size of the object is estimated on the order of 60 m to 190 m.

• The energy of the blast was most likely between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT and about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan

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Tunguska EventWhat happened?

• The Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 square kilometers.

• The shock wave from the blast knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometers away.

• It produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected in Britain.

• Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow; it has been theorized that this was due to light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures

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What Can We Do?What about future impacts?

! Monitor

Find and Monitor near Earth objects

The first thing to do is to find and monitor near Earth objects above a certain size. NASA is already doing a pretty good job with that, but the work is not over as they are still finding more and more every year. Calculating their orbits far in the future is the next step, and if any seem to be coming a bit too close to Earth, we need to monitor them extra-closely and refine orbits until we are sure one way or the other.

Test stuff

The second part is having the capabilities of rapidly deflecting an inbound object. Ideally we would have all this stuff tested and ready to go within a relatively short time frame, rather than having to actually do the R&D and build the stuff after we've discovered a dangerous orbit. You don't want your test-run to have millions, if not billions, of lives hanging in the balance...

🔑 Be Ready

The End