NASA and the Planetary Society are giving students worldwide the opportunity to name an asteroid. And it’s not just any asteroid; an upcoming NASA mission will return samples of this asteroid to Earth. The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) will be heading to an asteroid, currently named (101955) 1999 RQ36. The poor asteroid just needs a name that is a little more exciting and user-friendly – something that is easy to remember!
Scheduled to launch in 2016, the mission could hold clues to the origin of the solar system and organic molecules that may have seeded life on Earth. NASA also is planning a crewed mission to an asteroid by 2025. A closer scientific study of asteroids will provide context and help inform this mission.
“Because the samples returned by the mission will be available for study for future generations, it is possible the person who names the asteroid will grow up to study the regolith we return to Earth,” said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The competition is open to students under age 18 from anywhere in the world. Each contestant can submit one name, up to 16 characters long. Entries must include a short explanation and rationale for the name. Submissions must be made by an adult on behalf of the student. The contest deadline is Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012.
Simulated asteroid image – topography overlaid on radar imagery of 1999 RQ36. Credit: NASA/GSFC/UA
The contest is also sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington; and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
A panel will review proposed asteroid names. First prize will be awarded to the student who recommends a name that is approved by the International Astronomical Union Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature.
“Our mission will be focused on this asteroid for more than a decade,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the mission at the University of Arizona. “We look forward to having a name that is easier to say than (101955) 1999 RQ36.”
The asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. LINEAR is part of NASA’s Near Earth Observation Program, Washington, which detects and catalogs near-Earth asteroids, and comets. The asteroid has an average diameter of approximately 500 meters (1,640 feet).
“We are excited to have discovered the minor planet that will be visited by the OSIRIS-REx mission and to be able to engage students around the world to suggest a name for 1999 RQ36,” said Grant Stokes, head of the Aerospace Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and principal investigator for the LINEAR program.
The asteroid received its designation of (101955) 1999 RQ36 from the Minor Planet Center, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. The center assigns an initial alphanumeric designation to any newly discovered asteroid that once certain criteria are met to determine its orbit.
“Asteroids are just cool and 1999 RQ36 deserves a cool name!” said Bill Nye, chief executive officer for The Planetary Society. “Engaging kids around the world in a naming contest will get them tuned in to asteroids and asteroid science.”
Artist's conception of the Dawn mission. Credit: NASA
The feat has never been accomplished before and next week’s departure for the Dawn spacecraft from Vesta will be monumental. Dawn is on track to become the first probe to orbit and study two distant solar system destinations. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the giant asteroid Vesta on Sept. 4 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT) to start its two-and-a-half-year journey to the dwarf planet Ceres.
“Thrust is engaged, and we are now climbing away from Vesta atop a blue-green pillar of xenon ions,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director. “We are feeling somewhat wistful about concluding a fantastically productive and exciting exploration of Vesta, but now have our sights set on dwarf planet Ceres.
In the video above, the Dawn team looks back at the highlights of the year-plus stay in orbit around Vesta. Dawn’s orbit provided close-up views of Vesta, revealing unprecedented detail about the giant asteroid. The mission revealed that Vesta completely melted in the past, forming a layered body with an iron core. The spacecraft also revealed the scarring from titanic collisions Vesta suffered in its southern hemisphere, surviving not one but two colossal impacts in the last two billion years. Without Dawn, scientists would not have known about the dramatic troughs sculpted around Vesta, which are ripples from the two south polar impacts.
“We went to Vesta to fill in the blanks of our knowledge about the early history of our solar system,” said Christopher Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator, based at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). “Dawn has filled in those pages, and more, revealing to us how special Vesta is as a survivor from the earliest days of the solar system. We can now say with certainty that Vesta resembles a small planet more closely than a typical asteroid.”
Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011 and will reach Ceres in early 2015. Dawn’s targets represent two icons of the asteroid belt that have been witness to much of our solar system’s history.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at the giant asteroid Vesta on July 15, 2011 PDT (July 16, 2011 EDT) and is set to depart on Sept. 4, 2012 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
To make its escape from Vesta, the spacecraft will spiral away as gently as it arrived, using a special, hyper-efficient system called ion propulsion. Dawn’s ion propulsion system uses electricity to ionize xenon to generate thrust. The 12-inch-wide ion thrusters provide less power than conventional engines, but can maintain thrust for months at a time.
Caption: Artist’s Concept, Space Exploration Vehicle Use Comparison. Credit: NASA
Conspiracy theories abound that the Apollo landings all took place on a film set in California, but today NASA’s Desert RATS team begins a mission to asteroid Itokawa. They will land, rove and even undertake spacewalks, without ever stepping foot out of their home base at Johnson Space Center in Texas. This is no hoax however, but a simulated mission to test out NASA’s audacious plan to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.
The Desert RATS have been testing robots and other tools that could be used on future exploration missions since 1997, (this is their 15th mission) usually doing analog missions out in the field. “Desert” refers to the Arizona desert, where a lot of the team’s activities take place and “RATS” stands for “Research and Technology Studies.”
However, since they are now testing out a zero-G visit to an asteroid, the team will use mockups inside JSC’s Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, which offers a medley of tools and simulators that would be difficult to transport to a field test location.
For example, the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV) is designed to both rove across a planetary surface on a wheeled chassis or fly in space using advanced propulsion systems. Four crew members will take it in turns to live in and operate the simulator to explore the asteroid.
The MMSEV can be put on a sled on an air-bearing floor to simulate the moves that the crew might feel during a real mission. There will also be a 50-second delay in voice transmission, going each way to simulate the light-speed travel time between Earth and the asteroid.
The crew can also undertake spacewalks using ARGOS (Active Response Gravity Offload System) an overhead gantry crane system that simulates the reduced gravity environment. In reality nothing would stop astronauts from just floating off the surface but NASA is thinking about using jetpacks, tethers, bungees, nets or spiderwebs to allow them to float just above the surface attached to a smaller mini-spaceship.
A team of scientists from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate will ensure proper scientific methods are applied to asteroid sample collection techniques throughout the 10 day mission.
The mission is slated to run until August 30th or 31st. Find out more here or follow the NASA Desert RATS team on Twitter
Second image caption: ARGOS can be used to make spacewalkers feel as though they weigh 1/6 of their weight, as they would on the moon, or 1/3, as on Mars. Photo credit: NASA
“One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I didn’t expect to find a story about a stranded aviator and a cosmos-travelling boy in the United Nations bookstore in New York City.
Yet there The Little Prince was, prominently displayed on a table near the door – an easy find in a bookstore dominated by tales of war, genocide and oppression of minorities.
Is there a special reason why Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s message – of hope, of learning to judge yourself before others, and of keeping a childlike wonder about the world – is embedded in such a place, I wondered?
Purchased book in hand, I turned to the Internet for answers. Turns out the famed author and aviator lived in New York City for a time after escaping from occupied France in 1940. While there, he worked on three books, among them The Little Prince.
As a long-time fan of the book, I decided to go on a self-guided walking tour of his haunts. I only had about a day of tour time available and focused on two places: a restaurant and one of his homes.
La Vie Parisienne (3 East 52nd St.)
On the exterior of the second floor of a Midtown building rests a plaque commemorating Saint-Exupéry. In French and English, the plaque says several chapters of The Little Prince were written in a studio at 3 East 52nd St.
The studio actually was being used by Bernard Lamotte, a Parisian painter. It is said that his circle of artistic friends included luminaries such as actor-sketch writer Charlie Chaplin, actor-singer Marlene Dietrich, and of course, Saint-Exupéry.
Accounts say Saint-Exupéry was a writer who took to the skies to support his talents at the pen. Additionally, he drew on his experiences as an aviator in many of his writings, such as Southern Mail, Wind, Sand and Stars and Flight to Arras.
On the ground floor of the building was La Vie Parisienne (The Parisian Life), a French restaurant. Today, patrons can take in fine French dining at the same location courtesy of the restaurant La Grenouille (The Frog). The plaque is reportedly below where Lamotte’s table sat.
Saint-Exupéry’s residence (240 Central Park South)
Saint-Exupéry actually lived in three locations in the New York City area, but this one was the most accessible to me given time constraints.
Less than 20 minutes’ walk from La Vie Parisienne, Saint-Exupéry would have found the location an easy stroll from where he gathered with his friends. Just across the road from the six-decade-old building is Columbus Circle and Central Park itself, providing a respite from New York City’s busy streets if Saint-Exupéry desired it.
When Saint-Exupéry moved into the building in 1941, it was only a year old and considered to be very modern. Today, the two-tower building still looks very fresh courtesy of a renovation to its exterior a decade ago that among other things, restored the yellow-orange bricks to their former glory.
The Souvenir Français society (which honours members of the French military) initially wanted to place the plaque at this location. The owner denied them because he feared it would bring in tourists.
Saint-Exupéry yearned to defend his country and left for North Africa in 1943. He disappeared forever over the Mediterranean in 1944.
Still, New York City remembers him. As late as last year, a staged production of The Little Princeplayed at the New Victory Theatre, with the prince himself portrayed by a puppet.
All photos in those post taken by Elizabeth Howell. Historical information in this article, unless otherwise indicated, came from a 2001 article in The New York Times written by Christopher Gray.
The B612 Foundation announced in June of this year that it plans to launch the first privately funded deep space mission, a space telescope that will map the inner solar system’s asteroid population and chart their orbits over the next hundred years. The goal is to find every potentially Earth-impacting object out there.
“This is a very practical — and necessary — project,” Rusty Schweickart, Chairman Emeritus of B612, and Apollo 9 astronaut told Universe Today. “It can be done, it is exciting and we are trying to get the world to recognize that this is a great investment in the future of humanity.”
Caption: Sentinel’s field of view. Credit: B612 Foundation.
The spacecraft is called Sentinel, and it will be equipped with a 20.5-inch cryo-cooled infrared telescope that will scan for space objects such as asteroids and comets. It will be placed in orbit around the Sun, ranging up to 170 million miles from Earth, for its mission of discovery and mapping.
B612 Foundation is nonprofit group of scientists and explorers who advocate exploration of asteroids and monitoring of their trajectories to protect the Earth from potentially catastrophic impacts. Other notable members of the Foundation include space shuttle and International Space Station astronaut Ed Lu (B612’s CEO), project architect Scott Hubbard, a Stanford professor who once served as the head of NASA’s Mars’ missions, and mission director Harold Reitsema, former director of space science missions at Ball Aerospace.
The foundation is named after the asteroid in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s story “The Little Prince” which brought the young prince to various destinations, and originally the B612 Foundation focused on determining the best ways for deflecting a potential incoming asteroid. But it has since shifted its focus to the current project which involves only identifying dangerous near-Earth objects.
“We have been working this issue for a number of years,” Schweickart said via phone, “and finding these asteroids is the next step that everyone agrees needs to be done.”
Schweickart said for years, the expectations were that NASA would be doing a project like this.
“But you know the situation in Washington,” he said. “With NASA’s budgeting outlook and the priorities NASA currently has, it doesn’t appear like this is something NASA could get to for a long time. We decided that, given what is going on with privatizations and with launch costs coming down, this was something on the scale that could be privately these days. And in recognizing the delay of not doing it ourselves, we decided to give it a go.”
While NASA’s Near-Earth Object program is scanning the skies and has found nearly 10,000 objects, or about 90 percent of the estimated objects larger than a half-mile across, according to B612, there are a half million more asteroids larger than the one that devastated the Tunguska region in northern Russia in 1908. Of those, only one percent has been mapped.
Schweickart said the launch of Sentinel would be a seminal step.
“It is the big step to locate almost all the objects of a size that can really do damage on the surface,” he said. “In five and a half years, we can meet very rapidly the goal of 90% of 140-meter-wide objects. But going down to the smaller ones that can still do damage, like the size of Tunguska, we should have about 50% of those that five and a half years. If we end up with an extended mission, which we’d definitely like to do, we should get to 60-70% completion of objects down to 40 meters.”
That would put over 500,000 objects in the Near Earth Object database, and Scheickart said, “the nice thing about asteroids is that once you’ve found them and once you have a good solid orbit on them you can predict a hundred years ahead of time whether there is a likelihood of an impact with the Earth.”
The Sentinel spacecraft is being built by Ball Aerospace and has been described as a mash-up of the Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, both also designed by Ball. It’s wide-field, 24-million-pixel view should be able to map asteroids down to 40 meters.
B612 is targeting launch for 2017-2018, and their launch vehicle of choice is the SpaceX Falcon9.
Schweickart said Ball Aerospace has been working on the concept and design of this type of telescope for several years. “And we’ve been working with them on a daily basis for over a year now, so we are pretty confident that they can build this and we can launch and operate it,” he said, “but the new part of the challenge is raising the money.”
Currently B612 has specialists working on their funding, “and that is sufficient for now,” Schwieckart said. “As we move forward the costs will dramatically increase, no question. When you start bending metal and building spacecraft, and buying launch services you are talking a few hundred million dollars. But with anything like this, you raise that in stages.”
Since the announcement of the Sentinel mission comes closely on the heels of the Planetary Resources’ announcement of their own plans to privately travel to asteroids to mine them for minerals, Universe Today asked Schweickart to compare the Sentinel to Planetary Resource’s plans.
“Their plan is completely different,” Schweickart said. “We don’t have any relationship with them, but we’ve certainly talked with them. They are interested in developing resources from asteroids, and doing specific site surveillance of particular asteroids that they might want to use for resource development. But they have to know where to go. And our job is to find asteroids and map this territory – which is basically a region like a ‘donut’ around the Earth, so Planetary Resources will be consulting our maps, as many other people will, as well.”
And Schweickart added, “Our project has nothing to do with profit or investment for payback. This is for the survival and the benefit of humanity – everyone on Earth.”
But Schweickart called this territory of asteroids “the new frontier,” and protecting Earth is not the only reason for mapping asteroids. “It is not just planetary defense, it is also resources in the future, and places for human exploration, and it is science as well. We are going to end up with a map that can be used by many people.”
How difficult will it be for the Sentinel mission to be successful?
“You are talking to a technologist,” Schweickart said with a chuckle. “To me the technology is pretty straightforward, and we’ve got that pretty much in hand. But it is a different kind of project than what has been done before, so that is where the challenge lies. But I think this will be a very exciting process.”
For more information on the B612 Foundation and the Sentinel project and how you can donate, see the B612 Foundation website, or watch the video below.
An asteroid will pass by Earth on July 22, and thanks to the Slooh Space Camera you can watch it zoom by. There’s absolutely no chance this asteroid, named 2002 AM31, could hit Earth, as it is passing by at 14 times the distance of the Moon. But it should be interesting to watch the action live! As they have done with recent asteroid close passes, Slooh live-stream telescope views of the near-approach of this city-block-sized asteroid at http://www.slooh.com, starting at 4:30 p.m. PDT / 7:30 p.m. EDT / 23:30 UTC — accompanied by real-time discussions by Slooh’s Patrick Paolucci and Astronomy magazine columnist Bob Berman.
The asteroid is estimated to be 620 m to 1.4 km (2,000 to 4,500 ft wide) and will pass within 14 times the Moon’s distance from our planet.
Due to its size and proximity to Earth, 2002 AM31 qualifies as a near-Earth object as it’s more than 500 feet wide and within 4.65 million miles of Earth.
“Near Earth objects are no longer treasures only for the paranoid, or for those who secretly and strangely are rooting for an early apocalypse,” said Berman. “The entire astronomical community has reversed its thinking about them over the past few decades. Instead of living on an “island Earth” with little or no connection with other celestial objects, we now feel that collisions with comets or asteroids change the evolution of our biosphere, and maybe even seeded our world with the amino acids that started life long ago. In other words, these are important entities. Not to mention, there’s always that exciting little hint of danger.”
“One of our missions at Slooh is to provide the public with free, live views on fascinating celestial happenings,” says Patrick Paolucci, President at Slooh. “Near-Earth asteroid 153958 (2003 AM31) represents 1 of approximately 9,000 whizzing past Earth at any given moment, and we wanted to highlight this one as it’s only 13.7 lunar distances from Earth — similar to near-Earth asteroid LZ1 which zoomed past us unexpectedly mid-June.”
Image Caption: Divalia Fossa equatorial trough at Vesta pictured in side by side images showing apparent brightness and topography. The trough encircles most of Vesta and is located just south of the equator. It is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide. Rubria and Occia craters straddle Divalia Fossa. The image was snapped on Oct 16, 2011 from an altitude of 700 km (435 mi) from the HAMO mapping orbit. Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA
“NASA’s Dawn mission to Asteroid Vesta is going exceptionally well”, Dr. Marc Rayman, the mission’s Chief Engineer, told Universe Today in an exclusive interview as the revolutionary spacecraft nears the end of its more than 1 year long super science survey orbiting the giant space rock.
“The Dawn mission is not only going better than we had expected but even better than we had hoped.”
Dawn is Earth’s first mission ever to orbit and explore Vesta up close.
“We have acquired so much more data than we had planned even in late 2011! We have conducted a tremendous exploration of Vesta – the second most massive body between Mars and Jupiter, a giant of the main asteroid belt.”
“Now we are in our second high altitude mapping orbit (HAMO2), which is the final intensive campaign of the Vesta mission,” Rayman told me.
Image Caption: Dawn Orbiting Vesta above the “Snowman” craters. This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta above the Snowman craters. The depiction of Vesta is based on images obtained by Dawn’s framing cameras. Dawn is an international collaboration of the US, Germany and Italy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Indeed Dawn’s science and maneuvering endeavour’s at Vesta have proceeded so flawlessly that NASA has granted the science team a bonus of 40 days additional time in orbit split between the lower and higher science orbits known as LAMO and HAMO or the Low Altitude Mapping Orbit and the High Altitude Mapping Orbit respectively.
“Our original Vesta departure date was July 17, and now it is about August 26.” Rayman explained.
The bonus time at LAMO has already been completed. Now the team is about to begin the bonus time at HAMO – consisting of two additional mapping cycles beyond the four originally planned.
Each mapping cycle in HAMO2 consists of 10 orbits. Each orbit is about 12.5 hours.
“On July 14, we will complete mapping cycle 4 and begin 5 (of 6). On July 25 we will leave HAMO2 and escape from orbit on August 26. We will stop thrusting several times before escape to take more neat pictures, mostly of the northern hemisphere,” Rayman told me.
“As Dawn revolves, Vesta rotates on its axis beneath it, turning once every 5.3 hours.”
When Dawn arrived in orbit at Vesta in July 2011 the northern polar region was in darkness as the southern hemisphere basked in summer’s glow. Now as Dawn departs Vesta in August, virtually all of the previously unseen and unphotographed northern polar region is illuminated and will be mapped in exquisite detail.
Coincidentally on July 13/14 as HAMO2 Cycle 4 ends, I’ll be presenting a free public lecture about Dawn and NASA’s Planetary and Human Spaceflight programs at the Adirondack Public Observatory.
Image Caption: Asteroid Vesta and Mysterious Equatorial Grooves – from Dawn Orbiter. This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on July 24, 2011, at a distance of 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). This view shows impact craters of various sizes and mysterious grooves parallel to the equator. The resolution of this image is about 500 meters per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Why has Dawn been granted an extended mission ?
“Dawn has gone so well that we had consumed not even one day of our 40 days of operations margin,” Rayman stated .
“That allowed us to spend more time in LAMO. We had had some unexpected events to be sure, but we managed to deal with all of them so expeditiously that the entire margin remained intact. Then we received the (entirely unrelated) 40 day extension, which allowed us to leave Vesta later. That came about because of our being able to shorten the flight from Vesta to Ceres, so we could still reach Ceres on schedule in 2015.”
“That 40 days allowed us to spend still ~ 30 more days in LAMO and increase HAMO2 by 10 days to a total of six cycles. We got still more time by finding ways to make the trip from HAMO2 to escape a little more efficiently, and that’s what allowed HAMO2 to be even longer, with the additional eight days of VIR-only observations I described in my most recent Dawn Journal.”
“The summary is that every investigation has been more productive than we could have imagined, and because the exploration of Vesta has gone so well, we have been able to apply our unused margin to get even more out of the mission. It is very very gratifying and exciting.”
So we have a few more weeks to enjoy the wondrous sights of Vesta before Dawn fires up her revolutionary ion thrusters to escape the gravitational tug of Vesta and head off to the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest asteroid in the main belt of our Solar System – and which some have speculated may hold vast caches of water and perhaps even liquid oceans suitable for sustaining life.
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July 13/14: Free Public Lectures about NASA’s Mars, Vesta and Planetary Exploration, the Space Shuttle, SpaceX , Orion and more by Ken Kremer at the Adirondack Public Observatory in Tupper Lake, NY.
An artistic expression of how a large meteorite impact into the sea might have looked in the first second of the impacting. We do not know if the area that was hit was actually covered by water or if there was just a sea nearby. Source: Carsten Egestal Thuesen, GEUS
With shifting continents, rain, and wind, finding traces of ancient impact craters on Earth has been, literally, astronomically low. Now, an international team of scientists say they have found a massive impact crater in Greenland a billion years older than other known asteroid impact on Earth.
Scientists found the remains of the giant 100-kilometer (62 mile) wide crater near the Maniitsoq region of West Greenland and they believe it’s three billion years old. The largest and previously oldest known crater is the 300 kilometer-wide Vredefort crater in South Africa. Tipped on its side, the edges of the Maniitsoq crater would extend from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space.
“This single discovery means that we can study the effects of cratering on the Earth nearly a billion years further back in time than was possible before,” according to Dr. Iain McDonald of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, who was part of the team.
Finding the crater wasn’t an easy task. Today, the Moon still shows marks of the massive bombardment that took place between three and four billion years ago. The early Earth, with its greater gravitational attraction, would have experienced even more collisions. But the land around Maniitsoq has been eroded over the eons to expose crust that originally was 25 kilometers (16 miles) below the surface. Effects of the immense shockwave produced on impact penetrated deep into the crust and remain visible.
Evidence at that depth had never been observed before, says McDonald. “The process was rather like a Sherlock Holmes story,” said McDonald. “We eliminated the impossible in terms of any conventional terrestrial processes, and were left with a giant impact as the only explanation for all of the facts.”
Only about 180 impact craters have been discovered on Earth. Around 30 percent of them contain important natural resources, including nickel, gold, oil and natural gas. It was during an exploration of natural resources that evidence for the crater was discovered. “It has taken us nearly three years to convince our peers in the scientific community,” said McDonald. “But the mining industry was far more receptive. A Canadian exploration company has been using the impact model to explore for deposits of nickel and platinum metals at Maniitsoq since the autumn of 2011.”
The international team, led by Adam Garde, a senior research scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, or GEUS, contains members from Cardiff, Lund University in Sweden, and the Institute of Planetary Science in Moscow. Their work was recently published in the jounal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Image caption: An artistic expression of how a large meteorite impact into the sea might have looked in the first second of the impacting. We do not know if the area that was hit was actually covered by water or if there was just a sea nearby. Source: Carsten Egestal Thuesen, GEUS
Map caption: Black circle on map shows the location of the meteorite impact structure near the town Maniitsoq in Greenland.
An asteroid that recently passed by Earth is about twice as large as originally estimated, and it would have had serious global consequences if it had impacted Earth. Asteroid 2012 LZ1 was only discovered on June 10, 2012 by Rob McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. This Near Earth Object was thought to be fairly large, 502 meters (1,650 feet) wide, and quite bright. But astronomers using the planetary radar system at Arecibo Observatory were able to better determine the asteroid’s size, rotation rate and shape and found it to be about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) wide and actually quite dark.
Scientists consider a kilometer-wide asteroid is at the size threshold that could set off an extinction-level event if it were to hit Earth.
“This object turned out to be quite a bit bigger than we expected, said Dr. Ellen Howell from Arecibo, “which shows how important radar observations can be, because we’re still learning a lot about the population of asteroids.”
2012 LZ1 sneaked by our planet at about 5.3 million km (3.35 million) miles away, or about 14 times the distance between Earth and the Moon on June 14, and it won’t be back in Earth’s vicinity again until June 12th, 2053, and then will be about 3 times as distant.
The Arecibo astronomers have determined it won’t be a threat to Earth for at least 750 years.
“The sensitivity of our radar has permitted us to measure this asteroid’s properties and determine that it will not impact the Earth at least in the next 750 years,” said Dr. Mike Nolan, Director of Planetary Radar Sciences at the Arecibo Observatory.
Several amateur astronomers were able to image 2012 LZ1, and the original thinking was that it was very bright. Instead, the new size determination suggests that 2012 LZ1 must be quite dark, reflecting only 2-4% of the light that hits it.
This is another reminder that we don’t know everything about all the potential asteroid threats that are out there, and more searches need to be done to find and track as many of the near Earth asteroid population as possible. Asteroid 2012 LZ1 has been classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, which are asteroids larger than approximately 100 meters that can come closer to our planet than 0.05 AU (7.4 million km, 4.65 million miles). As of now, none of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, but both amateur and professional astronomers are finding new ones all the time, sometimes with just a few hours’ notice of a close approach.
Lead image caption: Asteroid 2012 LZ1 as seen by the Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on June 13, 2012. Credit: Nick Howes, Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero.
As reported, asteroid 2012 LZ1 came about 5.3 million km (3.3 million miles) from planet Earth on its closest approach on June 14th, 2012. The fairly big and unusually bright space rock is about 502 meters (1,650 feet) wide. The Remanzacco Observatory crew of Nick Howes, Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero captured this imagery of the pass.
Ian Musgrave in Australia also took some imagery of the pass:
Asteroid 2012 LZ1 imaged by Ian Musgrave with the iTelescopeT16. Click for larger view of the image.
According to a little research by David Dickinson (@Astroguyz on Twitter) by looking at ESA’s NEODYS-2 website, this rock won’t be back in Earth’s vicinity again until June 12th, 2053, and will be about 3 times as distant.
There was no danger this asteroid would impact Earth at the distance it passed, and it appears it won’t be a problem in the future. But it has been classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. PHAs are asteroids larger than approximately 100 meters that can come closer to our planet than 0.05 AU (7.4 million km, 4.65 million miles). None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although, as the Remanzacco team pointed out, astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
