Free Republic

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on how to “better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth,” Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a statement on Friday. The announcement comes after a meteorite exploded in a massive blast above Siberia that damaged buildings, houses and cars and injured about 1,000 people on Friday. "The light was so intense that it completely illuminated the courtyard of our apartment block," said Sergei Zakharov, head of the Russian Geographical Society in Chelyabinsk, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The sound, the shock wave came...

241 Germania $>100 trillion 164 Eva $>100 trillion 90 Antiope $>100 trillion 253 Mathilde $>100 trillion 132 Aethra $>100 trillion 84 Klio $>100 trillion 2 Pallas $>100 trillion 1 Ceres $67.45 trillion 1910 KU $64.42 trillion Each white dot is an asteroid.

Earth's gravity may not have the gravitas of Jupiter, but the planet regularly plucks small asteroids passing by and pins them into orbit. The mini-moons don't stay for long. Within a year or so they resume their looping, twisting paths like crazy straws around the sun. But others arrive to take their place. Simulations show that two asteroids the size of dishwashers and a dozen half-meter (1.6 feet) in diameter are orbiting Earth at any given time. Every 50 years or so something the size of a dump truck arrives. So far, there's been just one confirmed sighting. ... A...

Explanation: Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and ice-balls streak through our atmosphere daily, most evaporating quickly to nothing. Significant threats do exist for rocks near 100 meters in diameter, which strike the Earth roughly every 1000 years. An object this size could cause significant tsunamis were it to strike an ocean, potentially devastating even distant shores. A collision with a massive asteroid, over 1 km across, is more...

China's official news agency is reporting that the country's Chang'e 2 deep-space probe made an amazing flyby of the asteroid Toutatis this week, snapping a series of pictures as it passed just 2 miles away. The achievement signals China's entry into yet another exclusive space club. Only four of the world's space efforts have managed close encounters with asteroids: NASA (with NEAR Shoemaker and Dawn, for example), the European Space Agency (with Rosetta), Japan (with Hayabusa) — and now China with Toutatis

Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have uncovered new clues in the ongoing mystery of the Jovian Trojans -- asteroids that orbit the sun on the same path as Jupiter. Like racehorses, the asteroids travel in packs, with one group leading the way in front of the gas giant, and a second group trailing behind. The observations are the first to get a detailed look at the Trojans' colors: both the leading and trailing packs are made up of predominantly dark, reddish rocks with a matte, non-reflecting surface. What's more, the data verify the previous...

Scientists on NASA's asteroid sample return mission, Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx), have measured the orbit of their destination asteroid, 1999 RQ36, with such accuracy they were able to directly measure the drift resulting from a subtle but important force called the Yarkovsky effect -- the slight push created when the asteroid absorbs sunlight and re-emits that energy as heat... Observations that Michael Nolan at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico made in September 2011, along with Arecibo and Goldstone radar observations made in 1999 and 2005, when 1999 RQ36 passed much closer to Earth, show that...

NASA's WISE Telescope Detects 4,700 Possibly Hazardous AsteroidsBy Mark Whittington | Yahoo! Contributor Network – 10 hrs ago According to CNN, NASA has announced that there are potentially 4700 asteroids -- give or take 1,500 -- that are large enough and pass close enough to the Earth in their orbits around the sun to constitute a hazard. Hazardous asteroids A hazardous asteroid, as defined by NASA, is a body that is greater than 100 meters or 330 feet in diameter and approaches Earth within 5 million miles, about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. Such an...

Explanation: What would it be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's Dawn mission currently visiting Vesta to generate such a virtual movie. The above video begins with a sequence above Divalia Fossa, an unusual pair of troughs running parallel over heavily cratered terrain. Next, the virtual spaceship explores Vesta's 60-km Marcia Crater, showing numerous vivid details. Last, Dawn images were digitally recast with exaggerated height to better reveal Vesta's 5-km high mountain Aricia Tholus. Currently, Dawn is rising away from Vesta after being close...

Gannett newspaper, link only: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120117/NEWS/301170042/0/mobile/?odyssey=nav|head

Explanation: Though the sizes are not to scale, the Sun and planets of the inner solar system are shown in this illustration, where each red dot represents an asteroid. New results from NEOWISE, the infrared asteroid hunting portion of the WISE mission, are shown on the left compared to old population projections of mid-size or larger near-Earth asteroids from surveys at visible wavelengths. And the good news is, NEOWISE observations estimate there are 40 percent fewer near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 100 meters (330 feet), than indicated by visible light searches. Based on infrared imaging, the NEOWISE results are...

Want to mine an asteroid? Rather than travel to it with all their mining equipment, three Chinese scientists have proposed a better way. In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website, they have calculated the energy required to shift the orbits of the six thousand near-Earth asteroids and place them in Earth orbit for later mining. Of these, they found 46 asteroids that had the potential for such an operation, and two likely candidates for a space mission. One 30-foot-wide asteroid, 2008EA9, will actually be in the right place for this technique in 2049.

In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website, two Chinese scientists have proposed using a solar sail for deflecting any asteroid that happens to be aimed at the earth. The diagram to the right is their simulated mission to impact the asteroid Apophis, which will pass close to the earth in 2029 and — depending on whether that flyby puts it through a very small 600 meter-wide mathematical “keyhole” — could then return in 2036 on a collision course.

It seemed far-fetched on the silver screen. But the European Space Agency is planning to launch a mission similar to the plot of Hollywood movie Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis and his intrepid team attempt to blow up a huge asteroid that’s hurtling towards Earth. [snip!]

A surprise meteor shower spotted in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" dropped by an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27). The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short. The bits of debris appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun very...

A new record was set on 29 January 2011 when the science team operating a new prototype telescope discovered not one Near-Earth Asteroid, not two, but nineteen in a single night! “This record number of discoveries shows that PS1 is the world’s most powerful telescope for this kind of study,” said Nick Kaiser, head of the Pan-STARRS project. One of the most difficult jobs astronomers have in outreach is encouraging spending in asteroid discovery programs, to give us sufficient warning of any potential asteroids that will collide with Earth, while avoiding the temptation to whip up false panic. The risk...

Astronomer Brian G. Marsden, a comet and asteroid tracker who stood sentinel to protect the Earth from collisions with interplanetary rocks and other remnants of the solar system's creation, died Thursday of cancer at Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. He was 73. Director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., Marsden was perhaps best known for his 1998 announcement that an asteroid known as 1997 XF11 might strike the Earth in 2028, causing untold damage. The announcement sparked additional studies which quickly showed that such an impact was unlikely. Marsden,...

MONTREAL — Great balls of fire have been reported swooping over Eastern Canada and several U.S. states. Even NASA's on the case. There are different theories about what was behind the sighting of those fireballs. A NASA spacecraft got a closer look at one of the possible sources today. The spacecraft flew past Hartley 2 -- taking closeup pictures after the comet made one of its closest passes by Earth this week. But one expert is skeptical of reports that any fireballs came from Hartley -- which is roughly 1.2 kilometres wide and spews deadly cyanide gas. Scientist Peter Brown...

A new report calls on NASA to establish a Planetary Defense Coordination Office to lead national and international efforts in protecting Earth against impacts by asteroids and comets. The final report of the Ad-Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense of the NASA Advisory Council was delivered to the Council this month, proposing five recommendations that suggest how the space agency should organize, acquire, investigate, prepare, and lead national and international efforts in planetary defense against near-Earth objects.

Want to know what would happen if a 10km-wide asteroid came out of the sky and slammed down on your city? Scientists at Purdue University and Imperial College London have updated their popular impact effects calculator first produced in 2004. Users dial in details about the hypothetical impactor, like its diameter and density. The web program then estimates the scale of the ensuing disaster, such as the size of the crater left behind. It will also tell you how far away you need to be to avoid being buried by all the material thrown out by the blast, or set...

In separate 10-page letters to the House Committee on Science and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, outlines plans for "(A) protecting the United States from a near-Earth object that is expected to collide with Earth; and (B) implementing a deflection campaign, in consultation with international bodies, should one be necessary." ... While Holdren indicates that no large asteroid or comet presents an immediate hazard to our planet, the fact that devastating impacts have occurred on Earth in the distant past...

Evidence that water came to Earth during its formation from cosmic dust, rather than following later in asteroids, has been shown by a group of international scientists. The origin of the abundant levels of water on Earth has long been debated with the main differences in the theories being the nature of the material that carries the water, and whether the water came during or after planet formation. Now, Nora de Leeuw at University College London, UK, and colleagues have used molecular-level calculations to prove that dissociative chemisorption of water onto the surface of olivine rich minerals, such as forsterite,...

A United Nations working group is currently looking into how the UN should respond to possible threats to the planet from near-earth objects, such as asteroids, Mazlan Othman, the Director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York on October 14 2010, the UN News Service said. She said that the working group -- within the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space -- is expected to come up with recommendations which would be presented to the General Assembly for UN member states to make a decision on response...

A color composite image of the June 3, 2010, Jupiter impact flash. Credit: Anthony Wesley observing from Broken Hill, Australia. In a paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group of professional and amateur astronomers announced that Jupiter is getting hit surprisingly often by small asteroids, lighting up the giant planet's atmosphere with frequent fireballs. "Jupiter is a big gravitational vacuum cleaner," said co-author and JPL astronomer Glenn Orton. "It is clear now that relatively small objects left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago still hit Jupiter frequently." The impacts are...

**Update -- Intel Hub -- RSOE EDIS is reporting that a 1,000 strong search team was tasked with finding the impact area and so far have been unable to locate it... Such a colossal event, so little media coverage. Around 3:10PM Sunday afternoon residents of Colombia were awestruck when the clear sky was cracked open by a massive fireball that exploded upon impact leaving a 300 foot wide crater and a lot of rattled nerves.

The asteroid, which follows Neptune's orbit around the sun, ...classified as a Trojan, was found in a difficult-to-detect area near Neptune, known as the Lagrangian point L5. Lagrangian points are five areas in space where the gravitational tugs from two relatively massive bodies -- such as Neptune and the sun -- balance out. This allows smaller bodies, like asteroids, to remain stable and fixed in synch with the planet's orbit, as they orbit the sun... Trojan asteroids have previously been found in some of the stable points near Neptune and Jupiter, but this is the first discovery of a Trojan...

A FEW weeks ago, an asteroid almost 30 feet across and zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour flew 28,000 miles above Singapore. Why, you might reasonably ask, should non-astronomy buffs care about a near miss from such a tiny rock? Well, I can give you one very good reason: asteroids don’t always miss. If even a relatively little object was to strike a city, millions of people could be wiped out. Thanks to telescopes that can see ever smaller objects at ever greater distances, we can now predict dangerous asteroid impacts decades ahead of time. We can even use...

"It turns out that there are a significant number of asteroids that aren't just a single object, but two and even on occasion three in orbit around one another," Pollock said. He and his colleagues record information related to changes in amount of light reflected from asteroids. Sometimes this indicates the existence of a pair of asteroids that are revolving around each other... "When a single, irregularly shaped asteroid spins, the amount of reflective area changes and it appears to change brightness," Pollock said. "When you have two rotating asteroids revolving around one another, the brightness changes are much more...

LOS ANGELES – Worried about Earth-threatening asteroids? One of NASA's newest space telescopes has spotted 25,000 never-before-seen asteroids in just six months. Ninety-five of those are considered "near Earth," but in the language of astronomy that means within 30 million miles. Luckily for us, none poses any threat to Earth anytime soon. Called WISE for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the telescope completes its first full scan of the sky on Saturday and then begins another round of imaging. What's special about WISE is its ability to see through impenetrable veils of dust, picking up the heat glow of objects that...

PORTLAND, Ore.- An Oregon man said he set a world record for the classic video game "Asteroids" by racking up 41,338,740 points during an attempt broadcast on the Internet. John McAllister said his feat began Saturday at a friend's house near Portland and ended at 10:18 p.m. Monday with 41,338,740, beating the 27-year-old official record for the game of 41,336,440 points, Wired magazine reported. The player said his strategy involved accumulating points until he earned enough extra lives to give him time to stretch, eat and use the bathroom. The entire three-day gaming session was streamed live on Justin.tv. McAllister...

Little Sally, Little Billy, rest your heads. Do not worry about that terrible asteroid Apophis that NASA says has a 1-in-250,000 chance of obliterating planet Earth in 2036, when you will be turning 32. The asteroid will not destroy your brand new house, the one you bought with a sub-sub-prime mortgage. It won't land on your shiny electric Lexus with autodrunkensteer. It won't interrupt season 35 of "24," in which Jack Bauer tortures the thugs who swapped his Viagra for Metamucil. Why? Because Anatoly Perminov of Russia's space agency is reporting for duty. His agency is considering sending a spacecraft...

The first thing one must understand about the global warming agenda is that it has nothing to do with saving the earth from destruction and although there is validity in the science of climate change for the study of cyclical patterns in weather and temperature, the theory that the earth is being destroyed by man made greenhouse gases is pure nonsense. The recent "Climategate" scandal in the global warming community has shown that. They have been manipulating data for years in order to advance their theory and ignoring any science that says different. What they have been very successful in...

IT LOOKS inconsequential enough, the faint little spot moving leisurely across the sky. The mountain-top telescope that just detected it is taking it very seriously, though. It is an asteroid, one never seen before. Rapid-survey telescopes discover thousands of asteroids every year, but there's something very particular about this one. The telescope's software decides to wake several human astronomers with a text message they hoped they would never receive. The asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. It is the size of a skyscraper and it's big enough to raze a city to the ground. Oh, and it will...

Here are just a few more things to fear that you might not have considered fearing. If you're one of those oblivious people who's not living in constant fear of these things, you need to wake up and put on your pants one leg at a time or expect to pay the pied piper. Killer asteroids. According to Julie Luck, there are 20,000 asteroids just flying like crazy around our solar system ready to slam into Earth at any moment and either completely pulverize the planet or, hopefully, merely wreak massive death and destruction from the skies. A June 2003...

William K. Hartmann painted this conception of an asteroid impact on Mars. Similar explosions formed many of craters that international space probes have observed on the red planet. Hartmann, co-founder of the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is an internationally recognized expert on impact cratering and the evolution of planetary surfaces. Among his many contributions to the field, the Meteoritical Society is honoring his discovery of the Moon's giant Orientale impact basin, a discovery he made as a graduate student in 1962 under the direction of space sciences pioneer Gerard Kuiper. The society also is recognizing his development of a...

NASA needs more cash in order to meet its goal of finding nearby space rocks that could hit Earth in a devastating impact, a new report says. Congress ordered NASA in 2005 to find and track 90 percent of the large asteroids near Earth by 2020, but did not set aside the necessary funds required to do the job, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences. Without that funding, NASA will not be able to build the new facilities and telescopes required to track potentially threatening asteroids down to the size of about 460 feet...

Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend. An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year. That’s Jupiter doing its cosmic job, astronomers like to say. Better it than us. Part of what makes the...

VIENNA (AFP) – They call them the "people in outer space". But besides stopping extra-terrestrial arms races, this tiny UN office has very down-to-earth goals: to help poor countries develop crops and help manage natural disasters. Overshadowed by its larger UN siblings -- like the World Health Organisation, the nuclear watchdog IAEA or the refugee agency UNHCR -- the Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and its 27 employees sit almost forgotten in the vast hallways of the United Nations headquarters in Vienna. "If we do make contact with aliens, who do you think should be representing mankind?" jokes UNOOSA...

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere — but no longer. A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned. The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists. The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere — but no longer. A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned. The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists. The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified. "It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy...a very...

WASHINGTON (Routers) With his historic speech today, most analysts agreed that the Obama administration made huge inroads in rebuilding America’s relations with the rest of the solar system, reversing anti-terrestrial hostility that had understandably built up in the wake of years of Bush administration arrogance and interplanetary war mongering. In an address before the International Astronomical Union, the president made a moving plea for understanding to all the asteroids that may find our planet in their path. “This asteroid problem is one that we inherited from the last administration, which not only did nothing about it, but exacerbated it with...

STEREO: Into the Lagrangian Points I love it when we find uses for instruments that they were never intended for. In deep space terms, we can go back to Voyager 2, which carried a plasma wave instrument that was designed to measure the charged particles inside the magnetic fields of the gas giant planets it would pass. Voyager 2 was able to tell us much about dust impacts on a fast-moving spacecraft when it was realized that the plasma wave instrument would be able to sense the plasma created by vaporized particles. In other words, the instrument became a de...

VIENNA, Austria — It is disaster planning on a galactic scale: Space experts want to come up with a contingency plan on what to do in case a killer asteroid collides with Earth. The experts, including former American astronaut Rusty Schweickart, told U.N. officials Tuesday that the international community needs a plan to counter so-called Near Earth Objects in advance of the potential catastrophe. Deflecting asteroids — or at least evacuating people in areas where they might strike — could save millions of lives. "This is a natural disaster, which is larger, potentially, than any other natural disaster we know...

AN Australian researcher has won an international prize for her plan to wrap a giant asteroid with reflective sheeting to stop it colliding with the earth and destroying all life. Such an impact would have the force of 110,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs if the asteroid, which actually exists, hits the planet in 2036, said Mary D'Souza, a PhD student with the University of Queensland's School of Engineering. Far from being daunted by the prospect of global annihilation, Ms D'Souza went to work on a possible solution and took out the top prize in an international competition to find new ways...

In 1980, only 86 near-Earth asteroids and comets were known to exist. By 1990, the figure had risen to 170; by 2000, it was 921; as of this writing, it is 5,388. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part of NASA, keeps a running tally at www.neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats. Ten years ago, 244 near-Earth space rocks one kilometer across or more—the size that would cause global calamity—were known to exist; now 741 are. Of the recently discovered nearby space objects, NASA has classified 186 as “impact risks” (details about these rocks are at www.neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk). And because most space-rock searches to date have been low-budget...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - An asteroid that exploded over Siberia a century ago, leaving 800 square miles of scorched or blown down trees, wasn't nearly as large as previously thought, a researcher concludes, suggesting a greater danger for Earth. According to supercomputer simulations by Sandia National Laboratories physicist Mark Boslough, the asteroid that destroyed the forest at Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 had a blast force equivalent to one-quarter to one-third of the 10- to 20-megaton range scientists previously estimated. Better understanding of what happened at Tunguska will allow for better estimates of risk that would allow policymakers to decide...

Today, I present my handy guide to choosing a presidential candidate. I call it the Asteroid Test. Imagine this scenario: A mile-wide asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. Scientists say a collision is imminent and that it will obliterate life on the planet. Now ask yourself this: What would each presidential candidate do? (Disregard my own candidacy, which is strictly a Flip Side phenomenon.) Here's how I see some of our presidential hopefuls reacting when I run through the asteroid exercise: • Joe Biden: He would speak at great length on how to solve the crisis. His plan might not work,...

Smaller asteroids may pose greater danger than previously believed INCINERATION POSSIBLE - Fine points of the "fireball" that might be expected from an asteroid exploding in Earth's atmosphere are indicated in a supercomputer simulation devised by a team led by Sandia researcher Mark Boslough. (Photo by Randy Montoya ) Download 300dpi JPEG image (Media are welcome to download/publish this image with related news stories.)ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations...

Deflected asteroids may keep coming back 17 November 2007 What goes around comes around. Unfortunately, no such karma figures in plans to deflect asteroids on a collision course with Earth, a hearing of the US House Science and Technology Committee was told last week. One big whack will deflect an asteroid temporarily, but does not guarantee safety next time its orbit brings it close. Asteroid researchers have long debated the merits of deflecting asteroids with a powerful blast such as a nuclear explosion. However, Rusty Schweickart, who heads an asteroid research group called the B612 Foundation, told the committee that...