Asteroid Apophis

On Sunday, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning to bring the Hayabusa probe down to Earth in Australia, hopefully bringing bits of an asteroid down with it.

The probe visited asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2005 and attempted to collect samples of dust and pebbles from the rock. Because of glitches during the sample collection, scientists are unsure exactly what they will find when they open Hayabusa’s sealed sampling chamber.

But if successful, this will mark the first time asteroid samples are returned to Earth for analysis.

Although missions to celestial bodies such as Mars or the moon may sound more exciting than a mission to asteroid 25143 Itokawa, scientists say we have much to learn from these irregularly-shaped rocks that roll through our solar system. Here are 5 reasons why we should care about asteroids:

1.  They will tell us about the origins of our solar system.

“The materials in asteroids represent the building blocks of the planets,” said Carol Raymond,
deputy principal investigator on NASA’s Dawn mission, which lifted off in 2007 and will visit asteroid Vesta in 2011 and dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Because of the position of the asteroid belt that lies between the rocky inner planets and the gas giants of the outer solar system, the materials found there may hold clues as to why the planets are so diverse today.

For example, although Ceres and Vesta formed at roughly the same time – within the first 10 million years of the solar system’s existence – they have very different compositions now. Vesta, at some point, melted completely and then resolidified, so it is now smooth. Meanwhile Ceres does not show signs of having gone through this melting.

It’s possible, Raymond said, that Vesta experienced more collisions, or that it had a high amount of a radioactive form of aluminum that would have given off heat as it underwent radioactive decay. By studying each asteroid, scientists will be able to solve this mystery.

2. They will help us understand more about the origin of life.

Scientists do not fully understand how the first life forms arose on Earth from non-living organic matter, and asteroids may help us learn more about this puzzle.

Asteroids such as 2 Pallas and 10 Hygiea, which are both believed to have had water in the past, appear to have organic (carbon-based) compounds on them, Raymond said. Today, these asteroids have a more primitive chemical composition than Earth has – they are more similar to the conditions that existed in the solar system’s younger years. By studying them, we may learn about how life arose on our own planet.

“There are conditions that may have been conducive to life in the past,” Raymond said.

Plus, scientists think asteroids that landed on Earth long ago may have deposited some of the building blocks that helped start life here.

3. We may want to mine near-earth asteroids for metals.

“There is a keen interest in going to asteroids in the near-earth belt,” Raymond said. “They could be sources of valuable metals.” To investigate the feasibility of such operations, we need to know more about asteroid composition and the technical aspects of traveling to them.

Besides the opportunity for mining, these asteroids are also interesting from a scientific perspective, because studying them complements our studies of the major planets, Raymond said. Analyzing the differences between the planets and the smaller asteroids is like taking slices of the solar system at different times during its formation.

4. They may someday threaten to collide with Earth.

Because some asteroids orbit around the sun in paths shaped like elongated ovals, they cross Earth’s orbit every so often. And sometimes, they come very close to Earth itself. For example, in January, asteroid 2010 AL30 passed within about 80,000 miles (130,000 km) of Earth.

But 2010 AL30 was just at 36 feet (11 meters) wide. More worrisome is the prediction that asteroid Apophis will come very close to Earth on April 13, 2036. Although NASA predicts that it will pass no closer than 18,300 miles above Earth’s surface, Apophis is larger than two football fields. While that’s not big enough to create Hollywood-style global devastation, it could cause significant regional damage, were it ever to strike Earth.

5. Astronauts may go visit one, according to Obama’s new plan for NASA.

In April, President Barack Obama announced the next goal for Americans in space: visiting an asteroid by 2025.

In a panel discussion in April, astrophysicist John Grunsfeld – a former NASA astronaut who flew on five shuttle missions – suggested that one goal might be sending humans to purposely move an asteroid, to nudge the space rock to change its trajectory. Such a feat, he said, would show that humanity could deflect a space rock if one threatened to crash into the planet.

“By going to a near-Earth object, an asteroid, and perhaps even modifying its trajectory slightly, we would demonstrate a hallmark in human history,” Grunsfeld said. “The first time humans showed that we can make better decisions than the dinosaurs made 65 million years ago.”

Source:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/5-reasons-care-about-asteroids-100611.html

Newswise — A near-Earth asteroid named 2005 YU55 – on the list of potentially dangerous asteroids – was observed with the Arecibo Telescope’s planetary radar on April 19, 2010 when it was about 1.5 million miles from the Earth, which is about 6 times the distance to the moon, according to Michael Nolan, director of the Arecibo Observatory.

The Arecibo telescope is located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and it is managed by Cornell University on behalf of the National Science Foundation.

Arecibo radar imaging of 2005 YU55 at 25-ft resolution showed that this asteroid is about 400 meters (1,300 feet) in size – about a quarter-mile long – and about twice as large as previously estimated.

On the actual observation at Arecibo, Ellen Howell, a Cornell researcher at Arecibo, was the principal investigator. Other observers include Cornell researcher Patrick Taylor, and Nolan. Jon D. Giorgini of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., conducted the orbital calculations. Lance Benner, Marina Brozovic, both of JPL; Michael Busch of California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; and Chris Magri, University of Maine at Farmington, are collaborators on the project.

This object is on the list of “potentially hazardous asteroids” maintained by the Minor Planet Center, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

High-precision radar astrometry reduced orbit uncertainties by 50 percent. This improvement eliminated any possibility of an impact with the Earth for the next 100 years, and it was removed from the “Risk Page” maintained by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

After circling the Sun, 2005 YU55 will next approach the Earth to about 0.8 lunar distances on Nov. 8, 2011. It will pose no impact hazard at that time. Robert McMillan of the Spacewatch asteroid detection program discovered the asteroid on December 28, 2005.

President Barack Obama has proposed that NASA’s “Near Earth Object Observations” program be increased from $3.7 million in 2009 to $20.3 million in 2011. NASA has indicated that it intends to provide support to the Arecibo radar program if that funding remains in the budget. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., added $2 million to NASA’s near-Earth object research program in 2010 for support of the Arecibo research work. These funds will offset reduced funding from the National Science Foundation.

The Arecibo Observatory is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center which is managed by Cornell University under a cooperative agreement with the national Science Foundation.

WASHINGTON — Scientists have found lots of life-essential water – frozen as ice – in an unexpected place in our solar system: an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.

The discovery of significant asteroid ice has several consequences. It could help explain where early Earth first got its water. It makes asteroids more attractive to explore, dovetailing with President Barack Obama’s announcement earlier this month that astronauts should visit an asteroid. And it even muddies the definition between comets and asteroids, potentially triggering a Pluto-like scientific spat over what to call these solar system bodies.

This asteroid has an extensive but thin frosty coating. It is likely replenished by an extensive reservoir of frozen water deep inside rock once thought to be dry and desolate, scientists report in two studies in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Two teams of scientists used a NASA telescope in Hawaii to look at an asteroid called 24 Themis, one of the bigger rocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They examined light waves bouncing off the rock and found the distinct chemical signature of ice, said University of Central Florida astronomy professor Humberto Campins, lead author of one of the studies.

Astronomers have long theorized that hydrogen and oxygen and bits of water locked in clay are in asteroids, but this is the first solid evidence. And what they found on 24 Themis, a rock more than 100 miles wide with temperatures around 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, was more than they ever expected. About a third of the rock seemed to be covered in frost.

Furthermore, scientists didn’t just find ice; they found organic molecules, similar to what may have started life on Earth, Campins said.

“This asteroid holds clues to our past and how the solar system and water on Earth may have originated and it also has clues to our future with exploration of near-Earth asteroids,” Campins told The Associated Press.

“We’re showing that they’re wetter than we thought,” Campins said. “We’re showing they have organic molecules that might have been the building blocks of life on Earth.”

Earth, when it formed billions of years ago was dry, scientists say. So where did the water come from? One leading theory is from crashing comets, that are essentially icy snowballs.

But comets come from the outer reaches of the solar system and tend to have more heavy hydrogen than the water in our oceans, said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program office. Icy asteroids between Mars and Jupiter might have the right heavy hydrogen ratio to match what’s on Earth, said Yeomans, who wasn’t involved in the studies.

MIT’s Richard Binzel, also praised the studies, calling the findings “one more piece in the puzzle for an abundance of water arriving on Earth and having available the ingredients for life.”

Normally, the ice on the asteroid should have escaped Themis as a gas over thousands of years, but it’s still there after a billion years or so, Campins said. That means there’s likely a supply of ice inside the rock, replenishing the surface, he said.

And if that’s the case for other similar asteroids – especially those that come closer to Earth – then it would be a boon for visiting astronauts, Campins and others said. The astronauts could use the water to drink and to help make fuel. The new NASA space plan calls for astronauts to head to a nearby asteroid sometime in about 15 years as a stepping stone to Mars.

The icy asteroid also just makes a mess of the differences between asteroids and their cosmic cousin, the comet. The general definition has been that asteroids are dry rocks and comets icy snowballs.

Now it seems to be more a continuum of dry and icy with not much difference between asteroids and comets, Campins and others said.

And that, said Andrew Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University, co-author of the other study in Nature, could wind up another cosmic controversy like the debate a few years ago about whether Pluto was a planet. Pluto wound up demoted and is now called a dwarf planet.

Asteroid Apophis is a rock asteroid the size of a football field. If it were to impact the Earth is would be like 125,000 Hiroshima sized bombs. It would cause an earthquake magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale as the impact crater would be 3.4 miles across and 03 miles deep. The impact fireball would be 1.2X larger then the sun and would cause 25 miles per hour winds.

Viewed from San Diego, the fireball of hot vapor from the impact appears slightly larger than the sun. The heat is enough to warm, but not burn, your skin. The earthquake tremors wake many people from their sleep, and nearly everyone in the city notices them. Windows break; unstable objects topple over. A fine dusting of debris falls, with occasional quarter-inch fragments of rock. The air blast noise, as loud as heavy traffic, and 25 mph winds are the final signs of the impact. If Apophis were to land not in L.A. but in the Pacific, San Diego could suffer more; some scientists believe the ocean impact would trigger a tsunami.

Astrophysicists think that Apophis is the common type of asteroid, make of rock. But what if it were the rare sort, made of iron, and it inexplicable changed course and hit the city of Angels? Iron is more than twice as dense as the densest rock, and the impact would be much more devastating.

On April 15th, President Obama made his case to NASA workers in Florida on Thursday for abandoning plans to return to the moon and instead aim for asteroids, Mars and more robotic missions. This could be a great idea where we can learn everything there is to know about potentially harmful asteroids. The President’s idea and NASA believe that if we send a manned mission to a nearby asteroid we can gain a lot of information related to it which could help in missions to Mars and such.

We should actually take an additional step in learning about asteroids where instead of going far away from Earth and planting a man or women on an asteroid, why not find a very small asteroid and with the help of NASA’s  robotic technology we could literally bring the rock back and place it into a geosnych orbit.

Sure, it is a far fetched idea, but if we did such an experiment we could learn a lot about its structure, flight orbital path, and everything that we could think of. And the good news about this is that we can constantly do research on the asteroid instead of just one lone trip.

Check out this from the HuffingtonPost.com. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Landing a man on the moon was a towering achievement. Now the president has given NASA an even harder job, one with a certain Hollywood quality: sending astronauts to an asteroid, a giant speeding rock, just 15 years from now.

Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers.

“It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.

Going to an asteroid could provide vital training for an eventual mission to Mars. It might help unlock the secrets of how our solar system formed. And it could give mankind the know-how to do something that has been accomplished only in the movies by a few square-jawed, squinty-eyed heroes: saving the Earth from a collision with a killer asteroid.

“You could be saving humankind. That’s worthy, isn’t it?” said Bill Nye, TV’s Science Guy and vice president of the Planetary Society.

President Barack Obama outlined NASA’s new path during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.

“By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space,” he said. “We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history.”

On the day the president announced the goal, a NASA task force of scientists, engineers and ex-astronauts was meeting in Boston to work on a plan to protect Earth from a cataclysmic collision with an asteroid or a comet.

NASA has tracked nearly 7,000 near-Earth objects that are bigger than several feet across. Of those, 1,111 are “potentially hazardous asteroids.” Objects bigger than two-thirds of a mile are major killers and hit Earth every several hundred thousand years. Scientists believe it was a 6-mile-wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Landing on an asteroid and giving it a well-timed nudge “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and can avoid what they didn’t,” said White House science adviser John Holdren.

Experts don’t have a particular asteroid in mind for the deep-space voyage, but there are a few dozen top candidates, most of which pass within about 5 million miles of Earth. That is 20 times more distant than the moon, which is about 239,000 miles from Earth on average.

Most of the top asteroid candidates are less than a quarter-mile across. The moon is about 2,160 miles in diameter.

Going to an asteroid could provide clues about the solar system’s formation, because asteroids are essentially fossils from 4.6 billion years ago, when planets first formed, said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

And an asteroid mission would be a Mars training ground, given the distance and alien locale.

“If humans can’t make it to near-Earth objects, they can’t make it to Mars,” said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley.

Also, asteroids contain such substances as hydrogen, carbon, iron and platinum, which could be used by astronauts to make fuel and equipment – skills that would also be necessary on a visit to Mars.

While Apollo 11 took eight days to go to the moon and back in 1969, a typical round-trip mission to a near-Earth asteroid would last about 200 days, Crawley said. That would demand new propulsion and life-support technology. And it would be riskier. Aborting a mission in an emergency would still leave people stuck in space for several weeks.

The space agency may need to develop special living quarters, radiation shields or other new technology to allow astronauts to live in deep space so long, said NASA chief technology officer Bobby Braun.

Even though an asteroid would be farther than the moon, the voyage would use less fuel and be cheaper because an asteroid has no gravity. The rocket that carries the astronauts home would not have to expend fuel to escape the asteroid’s pull.

On the other hand, because of the lack of gravity, a spaceship could not safely land on an asteroid; it would bounce off the surface. Instead, it would have to hover next to the asteroid, and the astronauts would have to spacewalk down to the ground, Yeomans said.

Once there, they would need some combination of jet packs, spikes or nets to enable them to walk without skittering off the asteroid and floating away, he said.

“You would need some way to hold yourself down,” Yeomans said. “You’d launch yourself into space every time you took a step.”

Just being there could be extremely disorienting, said planetary scientist Tom Jones, co-chairman of the NASA task force on protecting Earth from dangerous objects. The rock would be so small that the sun would spin across the sky and the horizon would only be a few yards long. At 5 million miles away, the Earth would look like a mere BB in the sky.

“It’s going to be a strange alien environment being on an asteroid,” Jones said.

But Jones, a former astronaut, said that wouldn’t stop astronauts from angling to be a part of such a mission: “You’ll have plenty of people excited about exploring an ancient and alien world.”

An apparent meteor in Wisconsin and Iowa lit up the sky around 10:10 p.m. Central Time last night.

The ‘fireball in the sky’ was seen by hundreds, causing a flood of social networking activity. Said one Facebook user, Renee DeVries, “It looked like a red flare and then it changed to a yellowish color and looked as if it was falling from the sky.”

The AP reports that the meteor led to “rattling houses and causing trees and the ground to shake.”

Am I just imagining it or have there been many more meteors coming to earth than normal in the last several years? Even I saw two the same evening last September, while I was watching an outdoor music concert. The first one was huge and was proceeding across the sky horizontally, the second was the standard high up flash of light burning out. I don’t remember so many meteors or meteorites being spotted in such a short time span.

Tariq Malik
SPACE.com Managing Editor
SPACE.com tariq Malik
space.com Managing Editor
space.com – Tue Apr 6, 7:30 pm ET

A newly discovered asteroid will zip close by Earth Thursday, but poses no threat of crashing into our planet even though it is passing within the orbit of the moon.

The asteroid, called 2010 GA6, is a relatively small space rock about 71 feet (22 meters) wide and was discovered by astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Az. The space rock will fly within the orbit of the moon when it passes Earth Thursday at 7:06 p.m. EDT (2306 GMT), but NASA astronomers said not to worry…the planet is safe.

“Fly bys of near-Earth objects within the moon’s orbit occur every few weeks,” said Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement.

At the time of its closest pass, asteroid 2010 GA6 will be about 223,000 miles (359,000 km) from the Earth. That’s about nine-tenths the distance between Earth and the moon [more asteroid photos].

The space rock is not the first asteroid to swing close by Earth this year.

In January, the small asteroid 2010 AL30 passed within 80,000 miles (130,000 km) when it zipped by. Other space rocks have flown past Earth at more comfortable distances greater than several hundred thousand miles.

NASA routinely tracks asteroids and comets that may fly near the Earth with a network of telescopes on the ground and in space. The agency’s Near-Earth Object Observations program, more commonly known as Spaceguard, is responsible for finding potentially dangerous asteroids and studying their orbits to determine if they pose a risk of hitting the Earth.

NASA’s latest space telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) launched in December, has been given the task of hunting new asteroids that were previously undetectable because they shine only in the infrared range of the light spectrum.

So far, the WISE telescope has been discovering dozens of previously unknown asteroids every day. Some of those space rocks have been tagged for closer analysis since they may be potentially hazardous to Earth, WISE mission scientists have said.

This Wednesday an object 33 to 50 feet wide is going to whizz past earth, 80,000 miles away. Astronomers say that it is not heading in our direction but can be seen by a small telescope on Wednesday at 7:47 AM EST.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100112/ap_on_sc/us_sci_space_miss

The time is 4:36 Am Greenwich Mean Time on Friday the 13th of April 2029. A 25 million ton space rock called 99942 could possibly hit Earth which, if happens, could pack the explosive energy of 65,000 Hiroshima bombs. If an impact were to occure, this 820 foot asteroid popularly named Apophis could create an 800 foot tsunami which could you know, cause a lot of pain and destruction to the world.

Asteroid Apophis was named after the encient Egyptian God of destruction and darkness and on that Friday the 13th, a fews hours after into the night people all across Europe, Western Asia and Africa will look into the heavens and see what looks to be a bright star slowly making its way towards the west through the cancer constellation. Asteroid Apophis will be the first documented asteroid in the history of humanity to be clearly seen by the naked eye.

The question to be asked is, will Asteroid Apophis be more then a bright star in the sky?

According to scientists, if asteroid apophis passes through a “gravitational keyhole” of a distance of 18,893 miles, there is a possibility that the Earth’s gravitation could pull on the asteroid just enough where when it comes by on April 13th, 2036, it could actually impact the earth.

If in 2029, asteroid apophis does infact go through this gravitational keyhole, then we would have seven years to figure out a way to deflect the asteroid 5,000 miles, enough to just miss planet earth.

Well, have a good rest of the day!