near asteroid miss

[thoth II]

BA at his blog just posted a animated gif about neo DA14 2012 that is a must see, March 19, 2012.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...oid-2012-da14/

[R.A.F.]

Slight "nitpick" with the thread title....


A "near miss" is a collision....a near "hit" would discribe a object missing the Earth.



edit....re-reading the title, it doesn't actually say "near miss"....so apologies for my "picky-ness".

[thoth II]

RAF, thanks, you are corrrect. I also see at : http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/

on the neo sentry risk table, it says there are around 30 potential impacts with this one in the coming decades. I find how small these things are scary in that they can be perturbed around and no one is sure if they’ll hit . It’s like these potential impacts are rolls of dice.

[publiusr]

In the current issue of Av Week and space, we see Boeing going more to all electric comsats. A dry run for gravity tugs if all goes well.

[JustAFriend]

I'm really surprised no one has campaigned for smaller, less expensive missions to put
cheap solar-powered transponders on these known threats just to keep better track of them....

[publiusr]

That would actually be more expensive--like Rosetta. Deep Impact--and nuke strikes, just need flyby trajectories. Now if you can build a beeper that can strike something a few km/sec and still work--you'd have something. Rosetta, gravity tractors, rendevous missions--those need matching orbits to do what you suggest.

Rosetta is still in transit after all.

[Noclevername]

And yet with all the scare stories in the news, this real danger doesn't even rate a mention at 6 PM.

[chrlzs]

Slight "nitpick"...
A "near miss" is a collision....a near "hit" would discribe a object missing the Earth.

A nitpick to the nitpick.. A 'near miss' is not used in that way - it means a narrowly avoided collision, ie a miss, but a very close one. 'Near hit' is not commonly used, but is actually listed in places as a synonym for near miss..

Feel free to check online dictionaries, although I do understand the final arbiter here should be Gillian..

[Gillianren]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Idioms don't have to make sense.

[Jeff Root]

Gillian,

I'm not reliable at identifying parts of speech.
In "a near miss", doesn't "miss" act as a noun?
And "near" is an adjective which modifies it?

So it is a miss. What kind of miss? A near one.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[Gillianren]

The issue is that "near" usually implies "almost" in typical language. That is not the case here, but it's unusual. It is possible that a "near miss" is something which almost missed but didn't. There is an argument to be made for that. However, I would say that argument is wrong, because that's not how the expression is ever used by anyone, and the language does not preclude it.

[Noclevername]

"Near" meaning "close", as in "it missed but got near", not "it nearly missed".

[Cosmologist]

I understood it to mean missed but came near. A near miss. Made perfect sense to me. Not everyone perceives language in the same way. Thats why it is constantly evolving. I'm fluent in German and that has rewired my thinking a little. The sentence structure is almost identical to english but sometimes verbs are placed at the end.

In Japanese they say yes instead of no to confirm a negative.

English.
"No I'm not going out tonight.

Japanese.
"Yes I'm not going out tonight."

Both make sense. you just have to be thinking the same way as the speaker to understand. I don't speak Japanese. I just have a lot of japanese friends. A lot of them go into the sciences.

[R.A.F.]

Is it a "fat chance" or a "slim" chance?


I'm sorry I even brought it up....It reminds me of the old "..is 99999.....=1" thread

[Jeff Root]

The thread title doesn't even say "near miss".
It says "near-Earth asteroid (NEA) misses Earth".
Only some bits are missing, ma'am.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[Cosmologist]

Flammable or inflammable? I love contronyms. Also called antagonyms, auto-antonyms, self-antonyms, self-contradicting words, janus words etc.


Decimate is usually used to mean "totally destroyed" rather than "reduced by 10%".

"The alarm goes off" actually means it goes on.

I always found it counter-intuitive that semi is used to refer to tractor-trailers, which are usually the largest vehicles on roads. It makes sense though when you look at the evolution of the term: first there were regular trailers, then semi-trailers lacking front axles and the 18-wheeler trucks used these, and eventually the word "semi" described these enormous trucks.

The North Pole is really the South Pole. (That is why it attracts the “north” end of a magnet.)

The “Coriolis Force” is not really a force, but an artifact of the Earth’s motion.

English is a funny language but there is nothing funny about hitting your funny bone.