Asteroid Collision In Asteroid Belt: P/2010 A2

Looks like we might have some new meteorites on the way here now after two asteroids collided in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

HISTORY’S FIRST RECORDED ASTEROID COLLISION

This is the first time in the history of mankind that such an event has been witnessed and recorded. Will there be meteorites from this event? Eventually, maybe…

Though the fragments of these two asteroids will take a very long time to get here because of so many forces acting on the debris that has been expelled from this massive collision. These fragments must orbit the Sun and cannot follow a straight path to Earth, so, it will most likely take a long time, if ever, for pieces of these asteroids to impact Earth.

The Voyager 1 probe is now well beyond our solar system and continues it’s journey out into interstellar space.  If a spacecraft traveling a reported 17/km sec can reach the outer limits of our solar system in little more than 30 years, is it possible that pieces of the debris could be deflected with a great enough force to propel them in the direction of Earth from the asteroid belt that is only just between Mars and Jupiter? It’s very unlikely.

To impact Earth, the meteoroid fragments must leave the asteroid belt at very high speed, and must have enough kinetic energy to zoom towards Earth past Mars’ gravitational pull, our moon’s gravity, and intersect the orbit of Earth at the exact moment and position that our planet is there for there to be meteorites from this event. Even then the pieces have to be of large enough size and of a composition stable enough to travel through our atmosphere and reach the surface without burning up. Then there are those pesky little oceans that cover 70% of our planet’s surface. Oh and the fact that people only inhabit a very small portion of the dry and habitable land, it’s unlikely that even if all this happened that this meteorite would fall somewhere where a human being would witness it.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’ll just have to just be content with watching this spectacle from here. But one can always hope.

“…NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

“This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets,” said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.”…” SOURCE – Nasa – Hubble