Monday, November 16, 2015

Some back of the envelope calculations....

In the last year 156 objects floating through space came within 5ld of Earth.  So if we look at this in a simplified 2 dimensional sense if we have a dart board 5ld in radius with the Earth at the center, that dart board got hit 156 times.

The total area of the dart board is:

5ld squared pi, converted to square miles....

1.25 million squared pi


~5 e12 square miles.

the area of the earth disk in the center would be

4,000 miles squared pi

or 5 e7 square miles

By these calculations we know of an object that should hit us about 1 in 100000 years.  Since we know that the Earth gits hit by shit more often than that we have a lot of work to do on our space program.