Tag Archives | Near Earth Objects

NASA Wants $100 Million To Catch An Asteroid

By majestic on April 1, 2013 in News 0

And just what do you think they’ll do with the damn thing if they actually catch it? From Aviation Week:

NASA’s fiscal 2014 budget request will include $100 million for a new mission to find a small asteroid, capture it with a robotic spacecraft and bring it into range of human explorers somewhere in the vicinity of the Moon.

Suggested last year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology, the idea has attracted favor at NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. President Obama’s goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 can’t be done with foreseeable civil-space spending, the thinking goes. But by moving an asteroid to cislunar space — a high lunar orbit or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point (EML2), above the Moon’s far side — it is conceivable that technically the deadline could be met.

… Read the rest

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Can We Stop The Next Meteor Strike?

By majestic on February 28, 2013 in News 11

Given the history of planetary destruction from meteor strikes in the past, trying to stop them from impacting our now vastly more populated planet seems like a good idea, but one wonders if it’s realistic. NASA is working on it, regardless, reports The Christian Science Monitor:

This month’s meteor detonation above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and Earth’s close shave with asteroid 2012 DA14 have kick-started conversations on lessons learned and what steps can be taken to prevent space rock impacts in the future.

One positive action item was actually in place prior to the dual asteroid events of Feb. 15: a new Memorandum of Agreement between the Air, Space, and Cyberspace Operations Directorate of the Air Force Space Command and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

That document, which was signed on Jan. 18 of this year, spells out specifics for the public release of meteor data from sources such as high-flying, hush-hush U.S.

… Read the rest

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Why Aren’t You Working On An Asteroid Shield?

By majestic on February 12, 2013 in News 1

An excellent and timely question, asked by Emi Kolawole at the Washington Post:

Seriously, why aren’t all of America’s best and brightest working feverishly to keep us from being struck by an asteroid that could wipe a city (or more) from the face of the Earth? A cure for cancer, balancing the nation’s federal budget, and eliminating world hunger would all be rendered moot if an asteroid pulverized the planet.

Granted, as the Post’s Brian Vastag reports, neither a city-destroying nor Earth-ending space rock is on anywhere near an immediate collision course with the planet — for now. (Seriously, don’t panic.) But the anticipated near-miss of asteroid 2012 DA14 by 17,000 miles on Feb. 15 should inspire every innovator to want to figure out how to make Earth asteroid-proof, right?

Now, of course, there are a number of people working on how to keep Earth safe from asteroids and other potentially Earth-threatening debris. There are so many, in fact, that there is an internationalPlanetary Defense Conference in Flagstaff, Ariz., in April.

And, as NASA Spokesman David Agle wrote…

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NASA Training Astronauts for Asteroid Mission

By bluemana on May 16, 2012 in News 18

The mission would not occur until the 2020s, so we all can rest assured that no harbinger of doom is on the way …? As Richard Gray reports in the Telegraph:

It is a space mission straight from the Hollywood film Armageddon…

A team of astronauts, however, have already started preparing for just such a mission. Among them is Major Tim Peake, a former British Army helicopter test pilot who is now the first official British astronaut with the European Space Agency.

Next month they will begin a training programme that will teach them how to operate vehicles, conduct spacewalks and gather samples on the surface of an asteroid.

While the primary goal of a mission to an asteroid will be scientific to learn more about their hostile environments, the skills needed to work on their surface could also prove invaluable should scientists discover one on a collision course with Earth…

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We Can Survive Killer Asteroids — But It Won’t Be Easy

By majestic on April 25, 2012 in News 4

Celebrity astro-physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson shares some advice on how to guard against pesky Near-Earth Objects (like the meteor that lit up California and Nevada last weekend), in Wired Science:

The chances that your tombstone will read “Killed by Asteroid” are about the same as they’d be for “Killed in Airplane Crash.”

Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities — more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks — comets and asteroids — that wander interplanetary space in search of targets.

Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. Some are rubble piles — gravitationally bound collections of bits and pieces. Most live between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and will never come near Earth.

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Mysterious Explosion and Daylight Fireball in Nevada, California Skies

By majestic on April 23, 2012 in News 6

Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison Dept. of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences

The consensus is that it was a meteor crashing to earth. Martin Griffith reports for AP via Christian Science Monitor:

A loud explosion heard across much of Nevada and California on Sunday morning rattled homes and prompted a flood of calls to law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Sierra Nevada, some reporting fireball sightings.

The sound and the light show were likely caused by a meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere, astronomers said…

Some people reported seeing a brilliant light streak across the sky at the same time. Sightings occurred over roughly a 600-mile line across the two states, including Reno, Elko and North Las Vegas in Nevada, and the San Francisco, Sacramento and Bakersfield areas in California.

Astronomers said they believe the mysterious light was a fireball, which is a very bright meteor. It will take time to determine the path of the fireball and where it broke up, they added…

[continues at AP via Christian Science Monitor]… Read the rest

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Comet Dies As It Flies Too Close To Sun

By majestic on January 23, 2012 in News 3

Photo: Science/AAAS

Allison McCann reports for Popular Mechanics on the visual trail of a comet as it approached the sun, vaporized, and finally disintegrated:

Sun-grazing comets are frustratingly elusive. As they approach the intense heat of the sun, these dirty snowballs turn to gas in a hurry and put on an impressive show before they disappear. But the intense solar radiation also makes the comet’s death extremely difficult to detect.

On July 6, 2011, solar physicist C.J. Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center and colleagues became the first to directly witness a comet falling within the solar corona, a sort of blazing-hot atmosphere that surrounds the sun. Labeled C/2011 N3 (SOHO), the comet is from the Kreutz family, the source of about 80 percent of the comets that pass so close to our star. The comet, moving at roughly 1.3 million miles per hour, was only visible to scientists for 20 minutes before vaporizing.

… Read the rest

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Large Asteroid 2005 YU55 to Pass Earth — Closer Than Moon

By HAL9000 on November 8, 2011 in News 12

Edward Lovett and Ned Potter Report on ABC News:

We have a visitor — a large asteroid called 2005 YU55 that is expected to come within approximately 201,700 miles of Earth on Tuesday, according to NASA. That’s slightly less than the distance from Earth to the moon.

Asteroids often pass this close, but most are tiny. Countless thousands of pieces come plunging into the atmosphere, but they burn up without doing any harm. If they’re as large as grains of sand, we may, if we’re lucky, see them in the night sky as shooting stars.

But 2005 YU55 is at least 1,300 feet wide — larger than an aircraft carrier, according to radar measurements. The last time an asteroid this big passed by was in 1976, and the next one scientists know of won’t be until 2028, NASA says. (There have been some rude surprises in between, but not involving anything remotely as large.)
Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., said this fly-by is an opportunity to learn more about c-type — that is, carbon-based — asteroids, to find “clues as to what it was like when our solar system was forming.”

More: ABC News… Read the rest

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Black-Market Trinkets From Space

By BananaFamine on April 5, 2011 in News 2

The Willamette Meteorite, the largest ever to be found in the United States.

The New York Times reports:

Ebay and other Web sites pulse with hundreds of sales pitches. “The pieces below have an exceptional patina,” a site called Star-bits.com said of 10 pictured fragments.

The ads are for chunks of meteorites, bits of asteroids that have fallen from the sky and are as prized by scientists as they are by collectors. As more meteorites have been discovered in recent years, interest in them has flourished and an illegal sales market has boomed — much to the dismay of the people who want to study them and the countries that consider them national treasures.

“It’s a black market,” said Ralph P. Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University who directs the federal search for meteorites in Antarctica. “It’s as organized as any drug trade and just as illegal.”

The discovery of a rich and historically significant meteorite crater in southern Egypt, just north of the Sudanese border, has shown the voracious appetite for new fragments.

… Read the rest

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Russians Claim U.S. West Coast Fault Near ‘Total Failure’

By majestic on March 20, 2011 in News 26

You have to appreciate the work that went into this “Apocalypse Soon” report in the European Union Times. Not only do they build on the “Ring Of Fire – America Is Next Great Quake” scare propagated by Fox News, they also manage to work in mass animal deaths, the Supermoon, a comet on its way to smash into Earth and more!

A grim top-secret report prepared by Moscow’s Institute of Physics of the Earth for Prime Minister Putin on the catastrophic 9.0 magnitude Sendai Megaquake and Tsunami that hit Japan on March 11th is now warning that the “balance of our planet” has been altered after the titanic forces underlying this disaster has moved the Japanese Islands at least 13-feet closer to the North American West Coast Region and shortened the day by a couple of millionths of a second and tilted the Earth’s axis slightly.

… Read the rest

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