I saw a mention of that elsewhere, but I didn’t realize that the core had a lower bound of 10km. Wow. I really hope it impacts too; we saw some chatter about the need for a space guard with a dinky little thing hitting Chelyabinsk, but imagine the effect of watching a dinosaur-killer hit Mars!
Different sources seem to have different orbital calculations, this one indicates a most likely close approach of ~100,000 kilometers with the uncertainty wide enough to include a close approach of 0 km.
If nothing else, we very well may get pictures from the surface rovers of the head of a comet literally filling the sky.
I saw a mention of that elsewhere, but I didn’t realize that the core had a lower bound of 10km. Wow. I really hope it impacts too; we saw some chatter about the need for a space guard with a dinky little thing hitting Chelyabinsk, but imagine the effect of watching a dinosaur-killer hit Mars!
For future reference, the JPL small body database entry on the comet:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=C%2F2013%20A1;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1;rad=0#cad
Different sources seem to have different orbital calculations, this one indicates a most likely close approach of ~100,000 kilometers with the uncertainty wide enough to include a close approach of 0 km.
If nothing else, we very well may get pictures from the surface rovers of the head of a comet literally filling the sky.