WOW That Was CLOSE!

Anyone feel like ducking Friday?  Why?  Well Wednesday astronomers got a bit of a nasty surprise.   Asteroid 2012 BX34  was spotted quite literally in our back door.  What's worse BX34 was going to get MUCH closer.  By Friday it was one fifth the distance to the Moon or 36,750 miles!  And yes sports fans, that is one of the closest approaches on record.  

In all fairness I ought to tell you the good news - BX34 will pass by, close, but a miss and it is small  - about 37 feet across.  Oh and it passed by at 10:30 est.  

Chinese want to Capture Asteroid?

In a complete reversal, it would seem that Chinese scientists are studying ways to capture an asteroid and bring it into Earth orbit! Why?!!! Well their initial argument is for mining purposes.

I can think of a million reasons why this sounds like a really bad idea, the Chinese scientists feel:

• they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon. The orbit would be unstable, and eventually the asteroid would drift out of near Earth Orbit - but it would be in proximity long enough for research and mining.

Initially the Chinese would start small...a hundred foot or so but there is every indication that asteroids in the mile wide metallic asteroids are being considered - with an estimated worth in the trillions.

Read the complete article for more details.

Complete Dvice Article Here
Wiki article on asteroid mining

Earth Almost Catches a Bus - sized asteriod that is...

Tim Sayell sends in an article concerning a very close call on June 27th of this year. A bus sized asteroid flew so close to the Earth that it was well inside many of satellites orbits.

Asteroid 2011 MD, passed within 7500 miles at 1pm passing over the coast of Antarctica before being slingshot back into deep space.

Asteroid 2011 MD was only discovered last week (June 22nd 2011) by Astronomers with the LINEAR near-Earth object survey in Socorro, N.M. The asteroid was in fact pretty small by comparison at the most only 66 feet long and is a Apollo object which means that they objects that cross Earth's orbit and have fairly short duration orbits among others.

Click here for the complete Yahoo News article

Jupiter just took a pounding, Is Earth next?

Since the huge impact on Jupiter is still fresh in our memories, I think it's fair to ask - what are the chances that the same could befall Earth any time in the near future?

Tim Sayell send in a good article from Yahoo News that deals with just such a question.

As the article points out: So far 784 near-Earth objects (NEOs) more than a half-mile wide (1 km) have been found. NASA has ruled out any of these as an impactor.

It's a safe bet that if 'an object of about the same size that just hit Jupiter also hit Earth — it was probably a typical cometary object of a kilometer or so in size (0.6 miles) — it would have been fairly catastrophic,'

Currently just one NEO poses any significant chance of hitting the Earth — 2007 VK184. This object is 425-foot-wide and should it hit Earth, it would strike with an energy of more than 10,000 times that of Hiroshima. 2007 VK184 has a 1-in-2,940 chance of hitting Earth 40 to 50 years from now.

Like the mosquito that you don't hear, it's the NEOs that we don't know about that are most worrying. NASA estimates that there are about 156 large NEOs 1 kilometer in diameter or larger that remain to be found. But the truly disturbing statistic is that objects of about 500 feet are extremely dangerous and only about 15% of these object have been discovered and only 5% of objects 150 feet in size.

Now the nitty gritty:
The dinosaur killers happen about once every 100 million years
Impacts of 1500 foot size hits about once every 500,000 years...so nothing is expected soon...
150 feet, about 700 years, 98 feet about 140 years or so.

So, nothing really worrisome with what we know so far....but a lot more has to be put into discovery and tracking before I feel safe.

Read the complete article here

Strange Asteroid Stalks the Earth

Shaun Saunders sends in an article from Universe Today and asks the question... Asteroid or alien probe?!!!

All tongue in cheek aside, asteroid 2009BD is indeed a very strange visitor. The 10 meter-wide asteroid will soon make a slow pass of the Earth, coming within 400,000 miles (644,000 km) of our planet. Before you get all w0rked up, 2009BD poses no threat to Earth now or in the future. It's the asteroids behavior that is proving interesting.

From the article:

• Astronomers believe the rock is a rare "co-orbital asteroid" which follows the orbit of the Earth, not receding more than 0.1 AU (15 million km) away.
• From preliminary observations, 2009 BD is projected to shadow our planet for many months (possibly years) to come. Until November 2010 at least, the asteroid will hang around the Earth, within a distance of 0.1 AU.

Astronaut says NASA wants to Nuke asteroids

I am starting to get a sinking feeling here. First I hear that Nasa is asking for funding to track Earth crossing asteroids. That's good.... Then NASA starts talking about reasonable ways to deal with possibly dangerous ones. Again good deal. Then we hear about Rusty Schweickart B612 Foundation, which wants to alter asteroid orbits in a controlled manner. My reaction is that this seems like duplication of efforts. Isn't that what NASA is working on? Why diminish that effort? Then what starts to sound like sour grapes Schweickart says NASA favors using nuclear bombs. But in a 2007 report, that's exactly what NASA is proposing. Now excuse me, hasn't this method proved itself to be one of the LEAST effective? Then reading in a Gizmodo article, NASA and Schweickart's motivations got a lot clearer. As Gizmodo puts it:

• Schweickart believes its (NASA) cash-strapped later years might have led the agency—under immense pressure from Washington—to endorse a program with an ulterior motive: put nuclear weapons in space.

I don't know why I should be surprised, it's well known that several shuttle mission were thinly disguised military, many of the pre-mercury launches like the Aurora were out and out spy flights, I can totally get behind there being ulterior motivations for what at first sounds idiotic. And in the end, what makes it totally insane, is the fact that a platform like this could be taken out with a well place can of nails. But that is another story...

Asteroid-hunting Satellite A World First

NewScientist online is reporting that Canada is building the world's first space telescope designed to detect and track asteroids. Called NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), the new satellite will to detect and study asteroids that pose a collision hazard with Earth. What's more it does it small and cheap! Weighing a mere 65-kilograms, and costing about $12-million , shows off once again Canada's expertise in compact "microsatellite" design. NEOSSat will be the size of a large suitcase, and is cost-effective because of its small size and ability to "piggyback" on the launch of other spacecraft. Its main optics will be a telescope with a 15-centimetre mirror, smaller than many backyard telescopes used by amateur astronomers.

<More from NewScientist>
<More from Science Daily>

Non Profit to study "gravity tractor"

Michael Reilly writing in IO9 writes a pretty scathing criticism of NASA's future plans as they concern NEOs and the possibility of impacts. As he writes: "While Griff and his Bush Administration cronies dust off their tie-dye shirts, smoke a bowl and try to relive NASA's Apollo golden years with their mission back to the Moon, it's good to know someone's paying attention to the Asteroid threat. " Who is the "someone" he mentions? That's Rusty Schweickart who is heading up the B612 Foundation. The non-profit is kicking $50,000 to a group of experts at Jet Propulsion Labs to study the "gravity tractor" method of deflecting Earth crossing objects or more accurately objects that are about to hit Earth.


The gravity tractor method is brilliant in its simplicity. Blowing up these objects is not an option. The only thing you change with that method is the difference of getting hit with a rifle bullet or a shotgun blast. Other methods rely on mounting engines on the objects. But this requires that you balance the engines exactly or fire the engines only when they are aligned properly. Also there are the size of the engines to consider. With our rocket tech at present, it would be like an ant pushing the QE2. So what makes the Gravity Tractor so attractive? Well in space you don't have to overcome friction only enertia. Also, no matter how big the mass differential, one mass will always atract another. So this is where the brilliant part kicks in. The idea is to build a fairly massive space craft. It could be build out of Lunar material or other small asteroids or whatever. It doesn't have to be unrealisticly huge, just as big as possible. The idea is to park this craft close to an incoming object. The masses will attract and what the tractor does is to keep the object at a constant distance with rockets or whatever. Its not mounted to the object at all. So the asteroid is allowed to spin and do whatever, but its never allowed to touch the tractor. Ever so slowly its pulled off its trajectory that would impact Earth. The real trick is that it has to be done early in its orbit. Because the attraction forces are light, it will take time to move the really massive objects. But once detected, setting the tractor up is the "easy" part.



<LiveScience.com via IO9>

Image: B612 Foundation

What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes

From Discover Magazine online

In 2004, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was hurtling toward a possible collision with the most populated swath of Earth—Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. Furiously crunching numbers on their computers, the researchers put the odds of impact in the year 2029 at exactly those of hitting the number in a game of roulette: 1 in 37. Researching back data proved that conclusion wrong, however in 2029 the asteroid, dubbed Apophis—derived from the Egyptian god Apep, the destroyer who dwells in eternal darkness—will zoom closer to Earth than the world’s communications satellites do. And April 13, 2036, it will return—this time with a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting somewhere on a line stretching from the Pacific Ocean near California to Central America. What causes even more concern is that this is far from an unusual situation. There are literally hundreds of thousands of small to medium object that are now being tracked that are no where near the size to end civilization like the one that killed off the dinosaurs, but still could pack a vicious wallop in the arena of a good sized nuclear or multiple nuclear weapon! Slamming into the ocean, Apophis could create a tsunami dwarfing the one that killed more than 200,000 people around Indonesia. NASA is trying to pinpoint 90% of the NEOs that could be extremely dangerous to life on Earth and ESA is in the experimentation phase of plans to deflect smaller objects before they hit Earth. Click here to read more about their concerns and first serious attempt at developing a planetary defense.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post