Imaging you’re on the space station going about your humdrum research. For some motivation to get through all the tedious science stuff on your plate you play your favourite Pink Floyd track on your ipod, looking out the window …
for some reason the flash tags are not embedding the video 
please to embed, cant watch youtube at work
someone had a lot of fun creating that. Unscientific though as a asteroid that size is highly improbable and wouldn’t be boiling inside as far as I am aware; then it will enter the atmosphere, most likely break into pieces and burn like hell; milliseconds before the pieces hit earth, the preceding superheated air will vaporise everything in their paths before striking depending on the mass x velocity of such pieces. The impact(s) will obviously be dramatic and one that size will almost certainly do what the moon did many millions of years ago…wonder if the rotation of the earth and its precessional cycle will be affected? You scientists here will have a field day with this one I think.
My observers (Moses book) in the ISS watched the earth destroyed and this is what happened to them:
The space station would continue circling the planet for another ten years in ever decreasing elliptical orbits as if on a gravity-fed umbilical cord, before it would re-enter the atmosphere to be incinerated in a defiant but spectacular fireball signalling the true end of modern man’s technology. In it would be the desiccated corpses of four highly trained scientists who were never able to figure out what had happened to Mother Earth. The uncertainty was a torture more vicious and enduring than any sadist could have devised or perpetrated. It lasted for almost a full year and 5 840 revolutions around the silent grey planet. Their oxygen was the first to run out and their deaths, although quick, had been planned and forecast with perfect accuracy. Waiting for it and not knowing what had happened to their wives and children had turned their hair snow-white.
There ya go GCG
Well, that could theoretically happen, it would require a moon from Jupiter, Saturn or a Kuiper belt/Oort cloud object being dislodged from their orbits and heading straight to earth.
There’s a theory that something very similar happened, when a planet hit the earth, and the resulting debris created the moon. It would have been early enough in the creation of the solar system that the object would still have been molten. In the modern day scenario, if the object has a liquid core a lot like ours, the tidal forces it experienced while being hurtled toward us might cause the surface to look like that.
Yes you’re right. My bad. I think that we’d have substantial notice of an approaching asteroid that size though, not that Bruce Willis will be able to do anything about it! While an asteroid smack is almost inevitable some time in the future, I wonder if a solar storm or a supernova with lethal consequences is not more likely, undetectable (almost) and a lot quicker. read here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32587618/ns/technology_and_science-space/
Actually not necessarily, most astronomers are looking along a band in the sky that traces the plane of the solar system where all the action is.
In 1996 comet Hyakutake was discovered only three months before it reached its closest approach to earth, about 15 million kilometers, which is nothing. The reason for the late discovery was that it approached earth at 90 degrees to the plane. It was detected by a Japanese amateur astronomer with binoculars!
Comets are often discovered by amateur astronomers. Professional observatories are too few and far between to cover the entire sky. And of course, the higher the magnification, the smaller the area that is surveyed.
It’s becoming rare for amateur astronomers to discover them because of automated telescopes. The king of comet spotting is the telescope sitting in space observing the sun SOHO. It has spotted 1685 comets so far.
Here’s an example of one such sighting by SOHO.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2010/04/SOHO_bradfield2004.jpg
The sun is blocked out with a disk, the white circle in the middle is the size of the sun. The line passing through the middle of the comet is an artifact of the camera on SOHO.
i checked a program on dstv the other day, concerning armageddon meteors. they recon, that you will need like a 30 year head-start to move the body out of earth’s orbit, if we use any technology known. they suggest to nudge the meteor bit by bit, untill it’s orbit is altered. (to just become a problem again later?)
personally, images like this below, rocks my socks.
my school library had a huge stash of sky and telescope, and i pinched the lot of them. my walls and books were covered in pics of gas clouds, supernovas, galaxies. pity i will never live to explore space myself.