Probe To 'Look Inside' Asteroids

BBC ^ | 7-28-2004 | Paul Rincon

[blam]

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids

By Paul Rincon
BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France

Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies

A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across.

The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved.

The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these mysterious bodies.

Different targets

Deep Interior would use two 30m-long radar antennas to build up a picture of the structure of the asteroids, including compositional boundaries and faults, and its topography.

This should show whether the asteroids are solid all the way through or are essentially floating piles of rubble.

It is intended to rendezvous with two asteroids which are each under 1km in size: Nyx and 1999 ND43.

Nyx is a so-called V-type asteroid, containing stony irons, chondrites and pyroxene. The other target, 1999 ND43, is not well understood.

The asteroids have partially been chosen because they are easy to reach.

The probe would also carry a radio tomography instrument - to examine electromagnetic properties - and two colour cameras.

Earth alert

A proposal for the project, described here at the Committee on Space Research (Cospar) scientific assembly, was submitted to Nasa two weeks ago.

The scientists behind the concept hope that, if accepted, the probe could launch as early as 2009.

The European mission would impact an asteroid

An asteroid mission concept - called Don Quijote was recently given priority over five other potential asteroid projects by the European Space Agency.

The mission is designed to help scientists understand how an asteroid on a collision course with Earth might be destroyed or deflected.

This mission would involve two spacecraft - Sancho and Hidalgo - launched on different trajectories to the same asteroid. Sancho would arrive first and orbit from a safe distance.

It would then measure the effects as Hidalgo is sent crashing into the asteroid's surface.

Nasa has a similar mission - Deep Impact - which will blow a hole in the comet Tempel 1 and measure the effects.

[blam]

I don't know if I like the idea of these guys playing pool out there with these asteroids...a lot could go wrong. (Oops, we bumped it to hard...and, now it's heading for earth.)

[Jackson Brown]

I had asteroids for many years...boy do they hurt.

[Atlantic Friend]

We know we'll be in for nine kinds of troubles if these scientist begin to pull 20-dollar (or Euros) notes out of their pockets and propose newbies to play pool with them for money, just to make the whole thing more interesting...

[blam]

Stray Star May Have Jolted Sedna

[sinanju]

Really now, if you want to know what an asteroid is like inside you have to do it the old-fashioned way

Paging Bruce Willis, this is NASA. Assemble your team...

[marty60]

Excuse me ...but didn't Bruce Willis already do this .."Armegeddon" ( I cry everytime I see it)

[Heavyrunner]

Not terribly likely...Space is awful big, and even if one of these does hit Earth, there's a chance it could hit France, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or certain provinces in Canada. :)

[Horatio Gates]

If Kerry kept his space-bunny suit from NASA, I can't think of a better person to send out to space to personally investigate the matter.

[marty60]

The French have really lost all credibility. they can't even come up with an original idea anymore.

[sinanju]

The movie was unbearable, but yeah, I tear up when I hear the song...


I could stay awake just to hear you breathing
Watch you smile while you are sleeping
While you're far away and dreaming
I could spend my life in this sweet surrender
I could stay lost in this moment forever
Every moment spent with you is a moment I treasure

I don't wanna close my eyes
I don't wanna fall asleep
Cause I'd miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
I'd still miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing


Lying close to you feeling your heart beating
And I'm wondering what you're dreaming
Wondering if it's me you're seeing
Then I kiss your eyes and thank God we're together
And I just wanna stay with you
In this moment forever, forever and ever


I don't wanna close my eyes
I don't wanna fall asleep
Cause I'd miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
I'd still miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing


I don't wanna miss one smile
I don't wanna miss one kiss
Well, I just wanna be with you
Right here with you, just like this
I just wanna hold you close
Feel your heart so close to mine
And stay here in this moment
For all the rest of time


Don't wanna close my eyes
Don't wanna fall asleep
Cause I'd miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
Cause I'd still miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing


I don't wanna close my eyes
I don't wanna fall asleep
Cause I'd miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing
Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
I'd still miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing


Don't wanna close my eyes
Don't wanna fall asleep, yeah
I don't wanna miss a thing


"Deep Impact" was a lot more believable, and Tea Leoni's last scene on the beach with Maximillian Schell as the tsunami bears down on them still gets me.

[Jivana108]

I couldnt help but laugh at the title of this thread...

The whole "probe" and "asteroids" thing... :)

[Blzbba]

I, for one, welcome our new Asteroid Overlords.

[marty60]

Oh my gosh. I love that song. Deep Impact was just as sad. When she gave her co-worker her seat on the evacuation plane so the womans daughter would not be alone was amazing.

[marron]

(Oops, we bumped it to hard...and, now it's heading for earth.)

That would make them easier to get to...

I wish they could figure out a way to cut a core sample and get it home. They could pick a dozen random sites on Mars, and a dozen asteroids at random, and see what this stuff is made of.

Of course, if we could get a lab built on the surface of Mars, perhaps another mobile lab out in the asteroid belt, and figure out a way to man it...

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[reagan_fanatic]

Rusty: "You got Asteroids?"

Dale: "No but my dad does. Can't even sit on the toilet some days."

[Horatio Gates]

The double entendre head line may be a ruse by the French to have HillaryCare fund their space program

[embedded_rebel]

If the french are involved, Hidalgo will arrive before Sancho.

[sinanju]

Fun and games aside, I don't understand why the article makes no mention of ESA's Rosetta mission and it's Philae lander http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/1/2004/04/01/story001.html.

[marty60]

Well it is the BBC. It probably is a planted story by the French. Any serious mission of this type would be headed by NASA. Or JPL,etc. The French were still testing Nukes in S.Pacific atolls until---15-20 yrs ago. I don't take this report seriously.

[SunkenCiv]

More Moons Around Earth? It’s Not So Loony
by Robin Lloyd

October 29 1999 -- Earth has a second moon, of sorts, and could have many others. Cruithne, the 3-mile-wide (5-km) satellite, takes 770 years to complete a horseshoe-shaped orbit around Earth, and will remain in a suspended state around Earth for at least 5,000 years. Every 385 years, it comes to its closest point to Earth, some 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers) away. Its next close approach to Earth comes in 2285. "We found new dynamical channels through which free asteroids become temporarily moons of Earth and stay there from a few thousand years to several tens of thousands of years," said Fathi Namouni, one of the researchers, now at Princeton University. Namouni’s colleague Apostolos Christou said, "At specific points in its orbit, it reverses its rate of motion with respect to Earth so it will appear to go back and forth." In his view, there are three classes of moons – large moons in near-circular orbits around a planet, having formed soon after the planet; smaller fragments that are the products of collisions; and outer, irregular moons in odd orbits, or captured asteroids like Cruithne. In the past year, astronomers have reported finding such objects around Uranus.

Perhaps the most significant development of this line of research will be the finding that such objects also wind up following these same channels to plummet through the atmosphere and wreak havoc.

V.A. Firsoff (Valdemar Axel Firsoff, as it turns out) wrote a lot of books (I think he's dead, but perhaps not), including Strange World of the Moon published back in 1959, ten years before the manned landings started, and even before the first robotic landers.

A while back I picked up a used copy for $1.98 at the enormous chain bookstore, which had "Shimon Kaplan, Israel" on the flyleaf, or whatever that blank first page is called. Hard to figure, considering this is Grand Rapids Michigan, but it's not exactly like a message in a bottle.

Firsoff's book is interesting in that it shows the prevailing ideas about what would be found on the Moon (it was already believed during the 19th century, and more relevantly, by the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, that humans would visit the Moon). In a chapter "The Earth's Fair Child or a Foundling?" Firsoff blows off the idea that impact plays any role on the Moon, attributing its surface features to vulcanism, a view that died a quiet death in 1972, when a geologist first set foot on the Moon.

Due to his volcanism bias, which was an outgrowth of his uniformitarian bias, he wasn't able to accept that the Moon's impact craters were in fact from impact, and attributes them instead to the Moon's capture by the Earth (as well as contraction of the lunar sphere), apparently after having been tossed off by the overspin condition very early in the history of the Earth (see Thomas Van Flandern for a similar articulation). He appears to envisage three encounters between the formed Moon and the Earth, resulting in temporary capture twice leading to the eventual outright capture.

...the Moon clearly could not have been the satellite of the Earth then, for a total period of about 2,000 million years... Spurr points out that the face of the Moon shows two systems of great surface fractures, or faults, lying about 30 degrees from the two poles and trending from west-south-west to east-north-east. This is explained by him as a result of the halting of the Moon's rotation... Curiously, the face of the Earth, too, shows a similar structure, with the same general trend -- the Highland Boundary Fault... The poles of the Earth would also seem to have shifted place on at least three occasions, in the Cambrian, Permian, and (lastly) Quaternary Periods, brining ice and cold to previously warm lands... some mighty force made the crust of the Earth slip (the rotational stability of the axis of a mass as large as the Earth is enormous) and the position of the poles wobbled... there exists on the Moon a triple grid of surface fractures... perpendicular to each other within each grid, the grids being of different ages... Cambrian, Perm-Carboniferous, and Tertiary.

Fascinating idea, based though it is on outmoded ideas about impact (i.e., Firsoff's view that there was no role for impact). He's basically given us a snapshot of the problems inherent with a fission origin (either by overspin or by impact), not least of which is that the fission origin also requires in orbit formation of the lunar sphere and capture by the Earth, while showing that capture is possible.

Here's Van Flandern's book (revised edition). FWIW, I don't agree with him regarding the origin of the moon, wonder how the EPH is an apparently frequent phenomenon while TVF provides no mechanism, and most notoriously, wonder how and why he remains a supporter of Richard Hoaxland's "face on Mars" nonsense:

---

Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets: Paradoxes Resolved, Origins Illuminated by Tom Van Flandern

---

[sinanju]

The last French nuclear test was in 1996, they seized the Rainbow Warrior for five months when it trespassed (not to be confused with the original Rainbow Warrior which they blowed up real good in '85). France has never had any difficulty sticking it to the leftys, or trashing their own supposedly sacred principles whenever they find it convenient.

[marty60]

The last French nuclear test was in 1996,

There ya go, they are so pedantic.

[sinanju]

I thought that the currently-prevailing theory was that a mars size planet impacted the primordial earth early on, and that the moon was formed of the debris. And as long as we're talking asteroids and comets let us just keep in mind that the spectacular battering that marked the moon also happend to earth, it's just that earth dynamic system swallows, buries, grinds away, etc. it's scars so much better.

The recent book Rare Earth dedicates one of it's chapters to the crucial role the moon (among many other factors) has played in making the earth hospitable for life.

[SunkenCiv]

currently-prevailing theory was that a mars size planet impacted the primordial earth early on, and that the moon was formed of the debris.

I'm very interested in impact, but there's no way for this impact scenario to be credible, even without bringing in the fossil evidence which shows it didn't happen. The impact model is not only impact, but also capture, as well as in-orbit formation. IOW, it's three models in one. Other than the impact advocates (and yes, they are legion), I don't know of any in-orbit formation advocates (that was once a viable model with a number of adherents).

And as long as we're talking asteroids and comets let us just keep in mind that the spectacular battering that marked the moon also happend to earth, it's just that earth dynamic system swallows, buries, grinds away, etc. it's scars so much better.

Yes, but that hasn't anything to do with the impact model for lunar formation. The hypothetical impact would have made the entire Earth molten again (provided the surface had yet cooled), and the infalling debris from the impact (it wouldn't be like knockin' out a divet, the ejecta would go every direction) would have created craters. But, that's not where the craters came from, because there was no such event. Mars' craters were in some large part formed in a single impact event, but the rest were single or doublet impacts.

The recent book Rare Earth dedicates one of it's chapters to the crucial role the moon (among many other factors) has played in making the earth hospitable for life.

The authors try in that book to build a case for the uniqueness of the Earth and for life on Earth, grinding some political axe. To them, every little characteristic of the Earth that they care to include adds up to the impossibility of life elsewhere. Since the Moon hasn't always been a satellite of the Earth, what they say about it has no bearing on anything. For that matter, not much in that book is worth mentioning.

Cordially...

'Civ, who sez: George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[snowsislander]

I wish they could figure out a way to cut a core sample and get it home. They could pick a dozen random sites on Mars, and a dozen asteroids at random, and see what this stuff is made of.

If all goes well, (and that is a big "if", it is an extraordinarily ambitious mission), Japan's Hayabusa should be back with asteroid samples (not a core, just a small amount from the surface) in 2007 -- it is now on its way to the asteroid belt to attempt to rendezvous with Itokawa, and it is driven by a microwave ion propulsion drive. It just did a swing-by of Earth back in May of this year.

[marron]

Wow. Even that sample could tell us a lot, I think.

[SunkenCiv]