Tag: asteroid

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NASA Prepares for Possible Cosmic Collisions

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NASA, along with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and several other governmental agencies collaborated on this federal planning document for NEOs. 

The 20-page document is titled “The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan,” and organizes and coordinates efforts related to the NEO efforts within the federal government during the next 10 years to ensure the nation can more effectively respond in case this type of very low-probability but very high-consequence natural disaster should occur.
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program funds asteroid detection and tracking efforts at observatories across the U.S. and in space, and collaborates with other observatories around the world. The NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, maps and publishes the orbits of all detected objects so that everyone can understand the potential risk. NASA also is studying approaches for deflecting (turning aside) or disrupting (breaking up) asteroids. By completing the action plan, NASA and several other departments and agencies will evaluate and begin development of various approaches and technologies for defending Earth from a significant impact.
The plan establishes five overarching strategic goals to reduce the risk of NEO impacts through improved understanding, forecasting, prevention, and emergency preparedness. The plan will:

  • enhance NEO detection, tracking, and characterization capabilities
  • improve NEO modeling prediction, and information integration 
  • develop technologies for NEO deflection and disruption missions 
  • increase international cooperation on NEO preparation, and 
  • establish NEO impact emergency procedures and action protocols


https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/federal-government-releases-national-near-earth-object-preparedness-plan/

AR #116

Secrets of the Carolina Bays, by Ralph Ellis

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Finnish team found out the composition of asteroid Phaethon

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The asteroid that causes the Geminid shooting star swarm has also puzzled researchers with its comet-like tail. The infrared spectrum of rare meteorites helped to determine the composition of the asteroid.

Postdoctoral Researcher Eric MacLennan holds in his hands a very rare type of meteorite, the so-called CY carbonaceous chondrite. Only six specimens of the same type are known. The sample is on loan from the Natural History Museum in London. (Image: Susan Heikkinen)
Asteroid Phaethon, which is five kilometers in diameter, has been puzzling researchers for a long time. A comet-like tail is visible for a few days when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun during its orbit.
However, the tails of comets are usually formed by vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide, which cannot explain this tail. The tail should be visible already at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun.
When the surface layer of an asteroid breaks up, the detached gravel and dust continue to travel in the same orbit and give birth to a cluster of shooting stars when it encounters the Earth. Phaethon causes the Geminid meteor shower, which also appears in the skies of Finland every year around mid-December. At least according to the prevailing hypothesis because that’s when the Earth crosses the asteroid’s path.
Until now, theories about what happens on Phaethon’s surface near the Sun have remained purely hypothetical. What comes off the asteroid? How? The answer to the riddle was found by understanding the composition of Phaethon.
A rare meteorite group consisting of six known meteorites
In a recent study published in the journal Nature Astronomy by researchers from the University of Helsinki, the infrared spectrum of Phaethon previously measured by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope is re-analyzed and compared to infrared spectra of meteorites measured in laboratories.
The researchers found that Phaethon’s spectrum corresponds exactly to a certain type of meteorite, the so-called CY carbonaceous chondrite. It is a very rare type of meteorite, of which only six specimens are known.
Asteroids can also be studied by retrieving samples from space, but meteorites can be studied without expensive space missions. Asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, the targets of recent JAXA and NASA sample-return missions, belong to CI and CM meteorites.
All three types of meteorites originate from the birth of the Solar System, and partially resemble each other, but only the CY group shows signs of drying and thermal decomposition due to recent heating.
All three groups show signs of a change that occurred during the early evolution of the Solar System, where water combines with other molecules to form phyllosilicate and carbonate minerals. However, CY-type meteorites differ from others due to their high iron sulfide content, which suggests their own origin.
Phaethon’s spectrum match the spectra of CY carbonaceous chondrites
Analysis of Phaethon’s infrared spectrum showed that the asteroid was composed of at least olivine, carbonates, iron sulfides, and oxide minerals. All of these minerals supported the connection to the CY meteorites, especially iron sulfide. The carbonates suggested changes in water content that fit the primitive composition, while the olivine is a product of thermal decomposition of phyllosilicates at extreme temperatures.
In the research, it was possible to show with thermal modeling what temperatures prevail on the surface of the asteroid and when certain minerals break down and release gases. When Phaethon passes close to the Sun, its surface temperature rises to about 800°C. The CY meteorite group fits this well. At similar temperatures, carbonates produce carbon dioxide, phyllosilicates release water vapor and sulfides sulfur gas.
According to the study, all the minerals identified on Phaethon appear to correspond to the minerals of CY-type meteorites. The only exceptions were the oxides portlandite and brucite, which were not detected in the meteorites. However, these minerals can form when carbonates are heated and destroyed in the presence of water vapor.
The tail and the meteor shower get an explanation
Asteroid composition and temperature explained the formation of gas near the Sun, but do they also explain the dust and gravel forming the Geminid meteors? Did the asteroid have enough pressure to lift dust and rock from the surface of the asteroid?
The researchers used experimental data from other studies in conjunction with their thermal models, and, based on them, it was estimated that when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun, gas is released from the mineral structure of the asteroid, which can cause the rock to break down. In addition, the pressure produces by carbon dioxide and water vapor is high enough to lift small dust particles from the surface of the asteroid.
“Sodium emission can explain the weak tail we observe near the Sun, and thermal decomposition can explain how dust and gravel are released from Phaethon,” says the study’s lead author, postdoctoral researcher Eric MacLennan from the University of Helsinki.
“It was great to see how each one of the discovered minerals seemed to fall into place and also explain the behavior of the asteroid,” sums up associate professor Mikael Granvik from the University of Helsinki.

AR #87

Russians Warn of Asteroid Hit in 2036

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Could a Sun ‘Umbrella,’ Fix Climate Change?

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Earth is rapidly warming say some scientists, and now they are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the effects of climate change. István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, has proposed a novel approach—a solar shield to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth, combined with a tethered, captured asteroid as a counterweight. Engineering studies using this approach they claim could start now to create a workable design that could mitigate climate change within decades.

The paper, “Solar radiation management with a tethered sun shield,” is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307434120).

One of the simplest approaches to reducing the global temperature is to shade the Earth from a fraction of the Sun’s light. This idea, called a solar shield, has been proposed before, but the large amount of weight needed to make a shield massive enough to balance gravitational forces and prevent solar radiation pressure from blowing it away makes even the lightest materials prohibitively expensive. Szapudi’s creative solution consists of two innovations: a tethered counterweight instead of just a massive shield, resulting in making the total mass more than 100 times less, and the use of a captured asteroid as the counterweight to avoid launching most of the mass from Earth.

“In Hawaiʻi, many use an umbrella to block the sunlight as they walk about during the day. I was thinking, could we do the same for Earth and thereby mitigate the impending catastrophe of climate change?” Szapudi said.

Szapudi began with the goal of reducing solar radiation by 1.7%, an estimate of the amount needed to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. He found that placing a tethered counterbalance toward the Sun could reduce the weight of the shield and counterweight to approximately 3.5 million tons, about one hundred times lighter than previous estimates for an untethered shield.

While this number is still far beyond current launch capabilities, only 1% of the weight—about 35,000 tons—would be the shield itself, and that is the only part that needs to be launched from Earth. With newer, lighter materials, the mass of the shield can be reduced even further. The remaining 99% of the total mass would be asteroids or lunar dust used as a counterweight. Such a tethered structure would be faster and cheaper to build and deploy than other shield designs.

Today’s largest rockets can only lift about 50 tons to low Earth orbit, so this approach to solar radiation management would be challenging. Szapudi’s approach brings the idea into the realm of possibility, even with today’s technology, whereas prior concepts were completely unachievable. Also, developing a light-weight but strong graphene tether connecting the shield with the counterweight is crucial.

AR #90

Asteroid Sail to Save the Earth?

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Cities on Asteroids? It Could Work—in Theory

Rochester University scientists use physics and engineering principles to show how asteroids could be future viable space habitats.

This past year, Jeff Bezos launched himself into space, while Elon Musk funded a space flight for a non-astronaut crew. Space collaborations between government and private entities, including Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin have become increasingly common. But with the recent emergence of the so-called “New Space” movement, aerospace companies are working to develop low-cost access to space for everyone, not only billionaires.
For a future beyond Earth, however, humans need places to accommodate homes, buildings, and other structures for millions of people to live and work.

Right now space cities exist only in science fiction. But are space cities feasible in reality? And, if so, how?
According to new research from University of Rochester scientists, our future may lie in asteroids (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2021.645363/full).

In what they deem a “wildly theoretical” paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the researchers, outline a plan for creating large cities on asteroids.

In 1972 NASA commissioned physicist Gerard O’Neill to design a space habitat that could feasibly allow humans to live in space. O’Neill and his colleagues worked out a plan for “O’Neill cylinders,” spinning space metropolises consisting of two cylinders rotating in opposite directions, with a rod connecting the cylinders at each end. The cylinders would rotate fast enough to provide artificial gravity on their inner surface but slow enough that people living in them would not experience motion sickness.

Since then, TV shows and movies including Star Trek and books such as Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game have depicted O’Neill cylinder-like habitats populated with human beings. Both Bezos and Musk have referenced O’Neill cylinders in their visions for future space habitats.

However, while O’Neill cylinders offer a solution to space’s lack of gravity, getting the necessary building supplies from Earth to space to create the O’Neill cylinders would be difficult and cost prohibitive.

Asteroids are rocky bodies orbiting the sun, leftover from the formation of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists estimate there are about 1,000 asteroids larger than one mile across traveling in our solar system.
But asteroids have several major drawbacks, the researchers found: the rock that comprises asteroids is not strong enough to handle getting even one-third of Earth’s gravity from spinning. Once an asteroid was set into rotation, it would merely fracture and break. Moreover, most asteroids are not even solid rock but “rubble piles”—clusters of loose boulders, stones, and sand held together by the weak mutual gravity of space. If the researchers wanted to make space habitats out of these asteroids, they’d have to figure out how to work with rubble piles.

The researchers imagine covering an asteroid in a flexible, mesh bag made of ultralight and high-strength carbon nanofibers—tubes made of carbon, each just a few atoms in diameter. The bag would envelope and support the entire spinning mass of the asteroid’s rubble and the habitat within, while also supporting its own weight as it spins.

Everything the researchers imagine in their study—from the motors needed to spin up the asteroid, to the carbon-nanofiber bag—are technologies people are currently either using or developing.

Pictures & Captions: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/cities-on-asteroids-it-could-work-in-theory-543862/

AR #52

Perfect Lunar Base

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Asteroid Impact Prediction Getting Better

On 19 November, asteroid 2022 WJ1 became one of the many small asteroids to strike Earth, but only the sixth we ever saw coming. For the second time this year, humankind predicted an asteroid impact. The ~1-m rock caused no harm and burnt up in the sky above Toronto as a striking fireball. The detection, warning and advance observations of this asteroid illustrate our rapidly increasing ability to warn of asteroid impacts, however small.

The new asteroid was first imaged by Catalina’s 1.5-m Mt. Lemmon telescope, and once four observations were made it was reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), 38 minutes after initial detection, at 05:31 UTC.

These four observations were enough to map out the asteroid’s path in the sky, and within a few minutes of this ‘astrometry’ being published, ESA’s own internal monitoring software reported that the object had a ~20% chance of Earth impact, possibly hitting somewhere in North America in the next two to three hours. A few minutes later, other impact monitoring programs also sent alerts outlining a similar scenario.

Following the potential impact notifications, observers at Catalina and elsewhere across the US got follow-up observations of the new asteroid. Less than 30 minutes from the initial trigger, the impact was confirmed with excellent precision: the small asteroid, likely less than a meter in diameter, was going to impact somewhere between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, near the US-Canada border, around 08:27 UTC (09:27 CET).

At exactly the predicted time, a ~1-m asteroid struck the atmosphere becoming a brilliant fireball above the expected location. Find out more about this event at ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) web portal.
Because of how the Solar System formed, small objects are in the majority in terms of their total population. It is estimated there are 40-50 million little asteroids and ‘just’ 1 000 of the biggest, giant ‘planet-killers’. The rest fall somewhere in between.

We currently know of more than 1.1 million asteroids, although many more are out there. Of those discovered, about 30 600 travel in an orbit that brings them near Earth’s own. These are the ‘near-Earth asteroids’ (NEAs).
The reassuring news is that almost all the giant asteroids have been found – more than 95% – and none are of concern for the next hundred years. Astronomers are tirelessly searching for every last one.

Small, meter-sized asteroids strike Earth every couple of weeks. They add to our understanding of asteroid populations, of fireballs and their makeup, but they aren’t a big priority when it comes to Planetary Defense because they pose no real danger.

The objects we are most concerned about are those ‘goldilocks asteroids’ that are large enough to do harm if they impact, and there are enough of them out there that we know, at some point, they will. The infamous Chelyabinsk impact in February 2013 and the Tunguska impact in June 1908 fall into this category, and when it comes to discovering these asteroids, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

That’s why ESA’s Planetary Defence Office is planning new telescopes on the ground and missions in space to improve our asteroid detection abilities, sending the Hera mission to the Dimorphos asteroid struck by NASA’s DART mission to test asteroid deflection, as well as working with the international community to prepare for the scenario in which a bigger asteroid is discovered on a collision course.

Pictures & Captions
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/The_sixth_asteroid_impact_we_saw_coming

AR #87

Russians Warn of Asteroid Hit in 2036

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What Would Asteroid Mining do to World’s Economy?

by Becky Ferreira

About a decade ago, the prospect of “asteroid mining” saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there’s been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a human presence in space will entail harvesting resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and beyond. In a recent paper, a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, examined the potential impact of asteroid mining on the global economy. Based on their detailed assessment that includes market forces, environmental impact, asteroid and mineral type, and the scale of mining, they show how asteroid mining can be done in a way that is consistent with the Outer Space Treaty (i.e., for the benefit of all humanity).


The research was conducted by He Sun, Junfeng Zhu, and Yipeng Xu, three researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. They are part of a research group known as GemAI (Group for Equity Modeling with AI) that explores the intersection between mathematical modeling, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences (largely focused on equity issues). The paper describing their findings is currently being reviewed for publication in the Annual Review of Sociology.


Simply put, the prospect of asteroid mining comes down to resources and the continued growth of human civilization. There are many reasons cited for this, from ensuring the survival of humanity and life on Earth (having a “backup location” or becoming “multiplanetary”) to fulfilling a basic and ancestral need to explore and “wander.” Then there’s the idea of preventing ecological collapse here on Earth through mining and manufacturing or ushering in a “post-scarcity” society by relocating all of our resource extraction and manufacturing to near-Earth space, Cislunar space, and beyond.


Carl Sagan, the late and great physicist, author, and science communicator, summarized these beautifully and related how the two might be intertwined at the intuitive level. As he put it:
“The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02023

Link to UniverseToday.com story:
https://www.universetoday.com/158611/what-would-asteroid-mining-do-to-the-worlds-economy/

AR #130

Life Sustaining Resources from Dead Space Rocks

by J. Douglas Kenyon

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Bulls Eye for Planetary Defense Test

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)—the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration—successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday (October 3, 2022), the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT. 


As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered.


“At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “As NASA studies the cosmos and our home planet, we’re also working to protect that home, and this international collaboration turned science fiction into science fact, demonstrating one way to protect Earth.”


DART targeted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a small body just 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter. It orbits a larger, 2,560-foot (780-meter) asteroid called Didymos. Neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth.
The mission’s one-way trip confirmed NASA can successfully navigate a spacecraft to intentionally collide with an asteroid to deflect it, a technique known as kinetic impact.


The investigation team will now observe Dimorphos using ground-based telescopes to confirm that DART’s impact altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos. Researchers expect the impact to shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%, or roughly 10 minutes; precisely measuring how much the asteroid was deflected is one of the primary purposes of the full-scale test.


“Planetary Defense is a globally unifying effort that affects everyone living on Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now we know we can aim a spacecraft with the precision needed to impact even a small body in space. Just a small change in its speed is all we need to make a significant difference in the path an asteroid travels.”


The spacecraft’s sole instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), together with a sophisticated guidance, navigation and control system that works in tandem with Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav) algorithms, enabled DART to identify and distinguish between the two asteroids, targeting the smaller body.


These systems guided the 1,260-pound (570-kilogram) box-shaped spacecraft through the final 56,000 miles (90,000 kilometers) of space into Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at roughly 14,000 miles (22,530 kilometers) per hour to slightly slow the asteroid’s orbital speed. DRACO’s final images, obtained by the spacecraft seconds before impact, revealed the surface of Dimorphos in close-up detail.


Fifteen days before impact, DART’s CubeSat companion Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), provided by the Italian Space Agency, deployed from the spacecraft to capture images of DART’s impact and of the asteroid’s resulting cloud of ejected matter. In tandem with the images returned by DRACO, LICIACube’s images are intended to provide a view of the collision’s effects to help researchers better characterize the effectiveness of kinetic impact in deflecting an asteroid. Because LICIACube doesn’t carry a large antenna, images will be downlinked to Earth one by one in the coming weeks.


“DART’s success provides a significant addition to the essential toolbox we must have to protect Earth from a devastating impact by an asteroid,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer. “This demonstrates we are no longer powerless to prevent this type of natural disaster. Coupled with enhanced capabilities to accelerate finding the remaining hazardous asteroid population by our next Planetary Defense mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, a DART successor could provide what we need to save the day.”


With the asteroid pair within 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) of Earth, a global team is using dozens of telescopes stationed around the world and in space to observe the asteroid system. Over the coming weeks, they will characterize the ejecta produced and precisely measure Dimorphos’ orbital change to determine how effectively DART deflected the asteroid. The results will help validate and improve scientific computer models critical to predicting the effectiveness of this technique as a reliable method for asteroid deflection.


“This first-of-its-kind mission required incredible preparation and precision, and the team exceeded expectations on all counts,” said APL Director Ralph Semmel. “Beyond the truly exciting success of the technology demonstration, capabilities based on DART could one day be used to change the course of an asteroid to protect our planet and preserve life on Earth as we know it.”


Roughly four years from now, the European Space Agency’s Hera project will conduct detailed surveys of both Dimorphos and Didymos, with a particular focus on the crater left by DART’s collision and a precise measurement of Dimorphos’ mass.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-dart-mission-hits-asteroid-in-first-ever-planetary-defense-test

AR Issue #68

Asteroid Defense Triumphs

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Planetary Defense Targets Asteroid

Using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes, the DART investigation team last month completed a six-night observation campaign to confirm earlier calculations of the orbit of Dimorphos—DART’s asteroid target—around its larger parent asteroid, Didymos, confirming where the asteroid is expected to be located at the time of impact. DART, which is the world’s first attempt to change the speed and path of an asteroid’s motion in space, tests a method of asteroid deflection that could prove useful if such a need arises in the future for planetary defense. 

In late September to early October, around the time of DART’s impact, Didymos and Dimorphos will make their closest approach to Earth in recent years at approximately 6.7 million miles (10.8 million kilometers) away. Since March 2021 the Didymos system had been out of range of most ground-based telescopes because of its distance from Earth, but early this July the DART Investigation Team employed powerful telescopes in Arizona and Chile — the Lowell Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory, the Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope — to observe the asteroid system and look for changes in its brightness. These changes, called “mutual events,” occur when one of the asteroids passes in front of the other because of Dimorphos’ orbit, blocking some of the light they emit.   


In October, the team will again use ground-based telescopes around the world to look for mutual events and calculate Dimorphos’ new orbit, expecting that the time it takes the smaller asteroid to orbit Didymos will have shifted by several minutes. These observations will also help constrain theories that scientists around the world have put forward about Dimorphos’ orbit dynamics and the rotation of both asteroids.
For more information about the DART mission.
https://www.nasa.gov/dartmission


https://www.nasa.gov/feature/dart-team-confirms-orbit-of-targeted-asteroid

AR Issue #56

Asteroid Threat Getting Serious New Attention

Early Rays

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Saving the World from Space Rocks

Scientists Struggle to Map the Threats
By Daniel Stolte and Koda Benavidez

An asteroid defense mission has been prioritized by a University of Arizona survey.

Planetary defense is part of an international cooperative effort to detect and track asteroids and comets that could pose a threat to life on Earth. Titled “Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032,” the report identifies planetary defense—mitigating the risk of an asteroid hitting Earth—as a top priority. It also is an element of NASA’s planetary science endeavors concerned with human health and safety. The report’s recommendations particularly focus on near-Earth objects, which are asteroids and comets that come within 1.3 times the distance between Earth and the sun.


Specifically, the newly released planetary science decadal survey recommends NASA fully support the development, timely launch and subsequent operation of NEO Surveyor, a dedicated, space-based mid-infrared survey designed to discover and measure asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth.


NEO Surveyor is led by Amy Mainzer, a professor in the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and one of the world’s leading scientists in asteroid detection and planetary defense. NEO Surveyor is a follow-on mission to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, space observatory. As principal investigator of NEOWISE, Mainzer has overseen the largest space-based asteroid-hunting project in history. Scheduled to launch in 2026, NEO Surveyor will greatly expand on what scientists have learned, and continue to learn, from NEOWISE.
“We need to map out the locations and sizes of the asteroids and comets that could potentially impact Earth if we want to divert or deflect them,” Mainzer said. “The decadal survey lays out a roadmap for ensuring that planet Earth has a robust plan for dealing with asteroid and comet impacts.”


Among the report’s other recommendations are two flagship missions, one for a probe to study the giant gas planet Uranus, and another to search for evidence of life on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The report also prioritized the Mars Exploration Program and the Lunar Discovery Exploration Program.


The report was sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology and medicine.

 

AR #99

“Celestial Close Encounter of the Physical Kind”

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Strange Space Object Spotted

Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Ever Seen Before

A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—with an ultra-powerful magnetic field.

Spinning around in space, the strange object sends out a beam of radiation that crosses our line of sight, and for a minute in every twenty, is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.

An animation describing the discovery, the behavior of the object and what it might look like. Credit: ICRAR.

Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, from the Curtin University node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, led the team that made the discovery.

“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” she said.

“That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.

“And it’s really quite close to us—about 4000 light years away. It’s in our galactic backyard.”

Issue #114
Is Anyone Home?