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I think seeing something world changingly large randomly smashing into our next door neighbor would leave me feeling something other than lucky.

But sure if it’s gonna happen, let’s get the neighbors a pool! Just let me uh… change my shorts.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9

An entire fragmented comet impacted Jupiter in 1994

> Over the next six days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km (7,500 mi) across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal).[24] Two impacts 12 hours apart on July 19 created impact marks of similar size to that caused by fragment G, and impacts continued until July 22, when fragment W struck the planet.[25]


This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

> Although the impacts took place on the side of Jupiter hidden from Earth, Galileo, then at a distance of 1.6 AU (240 million km; 150 million mi) from the planet, was able to see the impacts as they occurred.

We’re getting better at this stuff!


I say, better to have it happen on Mars than on Earth! Such an event would probably even have the positive effect of raising awareness and increasing funding of programmes that monitor asteroids hazardous to earth and technologies to deflect them.




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