Asteroid Apophis

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!

I got to tell you, Asteroid Apophis is really getting laughed at by the media. There are asteroids hitting the earth every month and it gets little attention. It is not until the Russian scientists that say there is a good chance of impact in 2036 that the news spends a half day talking about it and then silence.

Asteroid Apophis could be the biggest news story since, well, ever. Just image that if it did come around in 2029 and was deemed a threat for 2036, we would only have a few short years to prepare to intercept it so it makes good sense that the Russians are trying to get a team together to actually prevent this global killer from even getting near us.

In outer space. That is the short answer. The long answer still has elements of outer space but is much more complex. But the good news is that it is heading in our direction, or is that the bad news? It could miss us, right?

What is an Asteroid?

An asteroid is a celestial body, small or large, which orbits the sun with the other objects that are in our solar system, things like planets. Most asteroids are smaller then planets and very few actually get to be large. Every year, literally thousands of new asteroids are discovered.

In December of 2004, Asteroid 99942, now called Apophis was discovered and many observations indicated that there was a 2.7 percent chance that it could strike Earth in 2029. There were many more observations that said that the possibility of the asteroid hitting the earth were smaller then they thought.

However, when Asteroid Apophis swings by earth in 2029, it could go into what is known as the gravitational keyhole which is a specific part of space no more than 600 meters in diameter and if it does it could present a threat of impact on April 13th, 2036.

The distinct possibility that Asteroid Apophis could impact the earth in 2036 kept it on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale that they use to determine threat levels of possible near earth asteroids and Apophis remained on Level 4 which broke the record for any asteroid being on the list. It was then lowered to Level 1.

How is it that the Russians are taking the lead to preventing Asteroid Apophis? Could it be that the Russians know more than the NASA scientists that say it won’t impact the Earth? There are also rumors that there could be a possible impact by 2032. We will have more to say about that. The most important year will be in 2013 when Asteroid Apophis will be nearby and we can get a better look at it and then calculate exactly where it could go in terms of the Earth being in it’s future path.

Soon to come an asteroid that could kill us all, or perhaps only some of us. But what will it matter, all hell will have broken lose on earth anyway. The world is right in the path of this 1,500 foot Asteroid called Apophis.

On October 2005 it had been predicted that Asteroid Apophis will pass right below the altitude of geosynchronous satellites, which are at 35,786 kilometres (22,236 mi). This kind of near approach only happens every 1,300 years.

Apophis’ brightness will peak at magnitude 3.3, with a maximum angular speed of 42° per hour. The maximum apparent angular diameter will be ~2 arcseconds, so that it will be barely resolved by telescopes not equipped with adaptive optics.