PakledHostage

Relevant XKCD:

This made the news here in Canada yesterday: The Houston Chronicle, which previously endorsed Senator Ted Cruz in his bid to be elected to the US Senate, published an op-ed piece yesterday that retracted their support for Cruz and expressed regret that his predecessor, Senator Kay Hutchinson, didn't keep her seat. Probably the quote that caught the media's attention here in Canada was this one: Seems that the Houston Chronicle at least has a sense of humor...

I thought I'd add a link to nettcod's October 12th thread about the same video. For posterity... There's some interesting discussion in there.

You are probably thinking of Apophis, which makes a couple of near passes around about the 2030s. It was once rated a 4 on the Torino scale, but has since been lowered.

According to the NASA Near Earth Object Office, the newly discovered asteroid 2013 TV135 would impact with an energy of 2400 megatons, not 2.5 megatons. Fortunately, it is only a 1 on the Torino Scale. That translates to:

Thanks, that might actually be enough of a clue. It runs a bit of a Rube-Goldberg machine type architecture when the module loads. It sounds like I have to improve the reliability of that initialization code.

It sounds like it may somehow be loosing track of the spacecraft that contain the transmitter part when you stage. It updates its database of craft that contain the transmitter part every time the number of craft changes (i.e. when you stage). I will look for a bug there. Does it recover if you turn the Figaro receiver on and off with the right-click menu?

But KSP has a lot of unrealized potential. Kerbin's atmospheric temperature profile was modelled based on the Earth's and, despite the fact that Kerbin's atmospheric properties aren't consistent with the ideal gas law, you can use Kerbin's atmospheric properties and elementary aerothermodynamics to approximate realistic re-entry effects in KSP. Indeed this is what my old re-entry heating mod did. When the mod's "hardcore" mode was turned on, it would even approximate lift effects on the command pod. Players could use that lift effect to cause a slight skip, steepen their re-entry (at the risk of structural failure), or apply some cross-track trajectory adjustments. The plot below illustrates the re-entry corridor from my old mod (with the mod's "hardcore" mode lift effects turned off): The trouble is that the triggers for the visual re-entry effects aren't currently implemented very well in the game and they should really be fixed. For example, here's a plot of heat flux and velocity (among other things) for the Stardust sample return capsule's Earth re-entry: Notice that maximum heat flux for Stardust occurred while the spacecraft was still in the upper atmosphere. The same was true for the Space Shuttle. In the game, we don't see the plasma effects that should coincide with peak heating until the re-entry is almost over. Even so, it wouldn't be hard for Squad to tweak the game's visual re-entry effects for consistency with real-world physics and then incorporate some basic re-entry heating and structural stress effects. If I could do it in a mod, then it is certainly possible. The foundations for those changes already exist in the game.

I will look into this issue ASAP if someone can post details on how to duplicate the problem.

To be fair, there were established operating limits that should/could have justified delaying the launch until conditions were within limits... Likewise there are established procedures for flying a missed approach. It isn't unreasonable, in a well designed system, to expect a successful outcome when those types of situations are encountered by the people responsible. If they don't succeed, then either the system or the people failed. In the case of the Challenger, it is pretty clear that the people failed.

For what it is worth, (at least in the aviation industry) there is a non-trivial difference between an accident and an incident:

You left out a detail from the Wikipedia article you cited:

Sadly it often isn't that simple. Even though engineers practice under a strict code of ethics, they are human too. Some have higher risk tolerance because they aspire to be managers, and higher risk tolerance often means lower costs and a better performance review. Some have higher risk tolerance because they are too technically incompetent to realize that they're treading on dangerous territory. And others who have a lower risk tolerance are sometimes dismissed as being too conservative, even though they may well turn out to be right (as was the case for Roger Boisjoly at Morton Thiokol). Human factors will always necessitate a system of checks and balances, especially in safety critical industries and when big money or politics are involved.

I was surfing around before heading home for the day and I came across these. For your viewing pleasure... Bill Nye Explains Juno's Earth Fly By: Bill Nye asks "Does Jupiter Have a Core?": Bill Nye Explains Solar Powered Spacecraft:

One last update for completeness (maybe we'll look back on this thread in 2016):

Update 1945:

Update 1915 UT

I recall seeing on the NASA mission page that it would be faintly visible to the naked eye from Cape Town, but you'd have to know where to look. I can't find the site right now though because of the US government shutdown. Even so, a long exposure with large aperture (and maybe even an elevated ISO setting for good measure) should pick it up. I've been able to capture photos of equally faint satellites with my EOS-M.

You can actually see the Earth growing in the field of view now if you watch the edge of the spacecraft relative to the clouds. Just checked the weather forecast in Capetown. It is clear for the next few hours. Hopefully someone will be able to catch a photo of it going by!

Here's the view from Juno, according to Eyes on the Solar System, at 1815 UT:

I will try to post updates.

That looks like the moon to me? And the caption on that photo mentions that it was taken when Juno was 206000 km from the moon. I'm following the flyby in NASA's Eyes on the Solar System program (kind of like KSP's map view for the real world). Here's a screen shot taken at about 17:45 UT (about 8 minutes ago):

There have been a couple of documented cases of Earth grazing asteroids that passed through our atmosphere without impacting or being captured. I recall first reading about the real-life Great Daylight Fireball in Arthur C. Clarke's The Hammer of God. It seems that it passed within 57 km of the surface at 14 km/s and lost 800 m/s during its 100 second encounter with our atmosphere. The great daylight fireball did not appear to break up, but the asteroid that caused the meteor procession of 1860 did.