Space and astronomy news
In 2022, NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft collided with an object named Dimorphos. The objective was to test redirecting hazardous asteroids by deflecting them with an impact. The test was a success, and Dimorphos was measurably affected.
Follow-up research shows that Dimorphos was more than deflected; it was deformed.
Continue reading “DART Did More Than Deter Dimorphos; It Sent It Into a Chaotic Tumble”
While a NASA probe heads for an asteroid known as Psyche, telescopes have been probing it to prepare for the arrival. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope has found something quite unexpected on the surface – hydrated molecules and maybe even water! The origin of the water is cause for much speculation, maybe it came from under the surface or from chemical interactions with the solar wind!
Continue reading “There Might Be Water on the Surface of the Metal Asteroid Psyche”
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), launched in 2009, spent the next fourteen and half years studying the Universe in infrared wavelengths. During that time, it discovered thousands of minor planets, star clusters, and the first Brown Dwarf and Earth-Trojan asteroid. By 2013, the mission was reactivated by NASA as the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which was tasked with searching for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). For ten years, the NEOWISE mission faithfully cataloged comets and asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth someday.
Unfortunately, NASA announced on July 1st that it would be decommissioning this planetary defense mission, which is expected to burn up in our atmosphere later this year. On Thursday, August 8th, the mission was decommissioned after the final command was sent from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and related to the spacecraft by the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system. However, the scientific data NEOWISE collected during its ten years of operation will continue to inspire new discoveries!
Continue reading “NASA’s Says Goodbye to its Asteroid-Hunting NEOWISE Mission”
When NASA’s DART mission intentionally slammed into Dimorphos in September 2022, the orbit of the moonlet was altered. Researchers have studied the photos and data taken by DART before its impact, learning more about the geology of the Didymos/Dimorphos system. They have now estimated the surface age of both the asteroid and its moon. The asteroid Didymos has a surface age of 12.5 million years, while the moon Dimorphos is only 300,000 years old.
Additionally, the DART researchers concluded both Didymos and Dimorphos are rubble piles, with Dimorphos likely inheriting its boulders from Didymos.
“It’s a pile of gravel and boulders (and some sand/dust) held together by its own gravity, and really not anything else,” said Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team co-lead at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), on Bluesky. “There’s really no cohesion between different pieces of gravel or rocks on Dimorphos.”
Continue reading “The Surface of Dimorphos is Surprisingly New”
Space is big, really big! Finding new asteroids which are usually dark against the inky blackness of space is harder than looking for a needle in a cosmic haystack. Back in 1991 an astronomer discovered a kilometre wide asteroid which was subsequently found to have a smaller moon half its size. It was given the snappy name of 1991 VH which , after follow up observations was revealed to have a tumbling, chaotic rotation. This was the first binary asteroid that has been seen to exhibit this behaviour. A paper just published suggests that a close encounter with Earth as recently as 12,000 years ago could have started its tumbling motion.
Continue reading “This Binary Asteroid is Messed Up. It’s Probably Earth’s Fault”
Academic research on solar system objects has increased dramatically over the last twenty years. However, information on most of the estimated 1.2 million objects discovered in our solar system has been spread throughout various databases and research papers. Putting all that data into a single data store and making it easy to access would allow researchers to focus on their research rather than on where to collect data. That is the idea behind the Solar System Open Database Network (SsODNet), a project by data scientists at the Observatoire de Paris.
Continue reading “The Properties of 1.2 Million Solar System Objects Are Now Contained In A Machine-Readable Database”
According to the ESA’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center (NEOCC), 35,264 known asteroids regularly cross the orbit of Earth and the other inner planets. Of these, 1,626 have been identified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), meaning that they may someday pass close enough to Earth to be caught by its gravity and impact its surface. While planetary defense has always been a concern, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slamming into Jupiter in 1994 sparked intense interest in this field.
In 2022, NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission successfully tested the kinetic impact method when it collided with Dimorphos, the small asteroid orbiting Didymos. Today, the ESA Space Safety program is taking steps to test the next planetary defense mission – the Rapid Apophis Missin for Space Safety (RAMSES). In 2029, RAMSES will rendezvous with the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) 99942 Apophis and accompany it as it makes a very close (but safe) flyby of Earth in 2029. The data it collects will help scientists improve our ability to protect Earth from similar objects that could pose an impact risk.
Continue reading “ESA is Building a Mission to Visit Asteroid Apophis, Joining it for its 2029 Earth Flyby”
Nine months have passed since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx returned its samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth. The samples are some of the Solar System’s primordial, pristine materials. They’ve made their way into scientists’ hands, and their work is uncovering some surprises.
Some of the material in the samples indicates that Bennu had a watery past.
Continue reading “Asteroid Samples Were Once Part of a Wetter World”
Every year on June 30, Asteroid Day marks the anniversary of a meteor airburst in 1908 that leveled hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest land. But a more recent meteor blast — and a new plan for getting advance warning of the next one — is receiving some added attention for this year’s Asteroid Day.
The first-ever Schweickart Prize, named in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, is going to a researcher who has proposed a system for spotting potentially threatening asteroids coming at us from a difficult-to-monitor zone between Earth and the sun. It was just such an asteroid that blew up over the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, spraying debris that injured about 1,500 people and caused an estimated $33 million in property damage.
The proposal from astronomy Ph.D. student Joseph DeMartini calls for setting up a consortium of ground-based observatories, anchored by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, to focus on the twilight sky just after sunset and just before sunrise. Those are the times of day when astronomers have the best chance of finding sunward near-Earth objects (NEOs) that spend much of their time within Earth’s orbit.
“It’s a very interesting proposal that we hope gets picked up,” Rusty Schweickart said.
Continue reading “Happy Asteroid Day! Schweickart Prize Spotlights Planetary Defense”
Deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) is one of humanity’s most critical long-term efforts to ensure we don’t suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. There are plenty of suggested mission architectures to move a PHA out of the way, the most famous of which was the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which successfully changed the orbit of Dimorphos, a harmless small asteroid. That proof of concept bodes well for our chances of deflecting any future PHAs as long as they are discovered in time. But when it comes to the safety of the planet, we can’t be too careful, so developing more ways to deflect a PHA is better, and a paper from researchers at Beihang University details a methodology that is gaining some traction lately – using an asteroid’s regolith as a propellant.
Continue reading “Can We Use An Asteroid’s Own Dust to Deflect It?”