The idea of predicting an imminent impactor is very cool. I heard the boom from a confirmed bolide explosion on Saturday afternoon in Boston. It was cool. Would love to have seen the actual explosion but it was very overcast and may or may not have been visible in daylight anyway. I would definitely travel if I had a reasonable expectation of seeing one.

Edit: This was in fact visible - there is at least one video out there from much further from the likely impact in Cape Cod Bay

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Just wondering how Rubin affects the problem of asteroids being detected late.

Afaik it's not unusual for truck-sized objects to woosh past Earth, detected only after their pass. Or just days before. Weeks if lucky. Not a timespan in which one could mount a divert-mission.

Possibly this applies to bigger objects too? Some objects have a very dark surface & are very hard to detect in any case.

> In Rubin’s first year alone, scientists expect the observatory to find 1 million undiscovered asteroids — as many as have been documented in the previous 200 years of human history — as well as thousands of comets and billions of stars and galaxies.

Why stop at 200 years? It's also 300 years and 400 years, or 4 billion years :P

interesting, not a single word about satellites and how they are influencing the quality of their work. I would imagine the telescope is affected in particular of this problem by taking constant snapshots of huge areas in the night sky, but nope...

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