Latest Planetary defense Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com A huge asteroid the size of a city block will be skimming by Earth on Thursday night at 8:00 eastern time. The giant space rock is about 1,650-feet wide and is big enough to qualify as a potentially hazardous asteroid. However, experts stress there is no chance of a collision, and it will be passing Earth at a safe 3 million miles away. Astronomers in Australia discovered the asteroid 2012 LZ1 on Sunday night, and found that the object is going to offer...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Scientists have gathered with other experts to create a strategy for potentially hazardous Near earth Objects (NEOs). Nearly 40 scientists, reporters, risk communications specialists, and Secure World Foundation staff participated in a meeting in November last year to come up with a strategy for dealing with hazardous NEOs. The report created by the team will be presented at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and its...
The work of a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor has helped reveal a rare orbital shift and the density of an asteroid that will pass close to Earth. Josh Emery, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences, and the team of the NASA asteroid sample return mission called OSIRIS-REx have measured the weight and orbit of 1999 RQ36. They have found the asteroid has a low density and its orbit has drifted roughly 100 miles in the last twelve years. This deviation is...
Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com A NASA scientist would be a shoe-in at any state or county fair if hosting the "guess your weight" game. Steve Chesley of JPL's Near-Earth Object Program Office has accurately determined the mass of an asteroid from millions of miles away. Chesley used data from the Goldstone Solar System Radar in the California desert, along with the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to make his findings. He said he first...
NASA has just received observations from its WISE (or Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, giving them the best assessment thus far of how many PHAs (potentially hazardous asteroids) are floating around in our solar system. Now, the team at NASA can count these PHAs, discover their origins and predict what kind of harm they may pose to Earth. According to a report from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, these PHAs are a subset of a larger group of near-Earth asteroids...
WASHINGTON, May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. The results reveal new information about their total numbers, origins and the possible dangers they may pose. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, are a subset of the larger group of near-Earth...
Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com The European Space Agency (ESA) is reaching out to amateur astronomers, asking for their help in discovering potentially dangerous space rocks. ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program helps keep up with space hazards, with everything from space weather to debris objects in Earth orbit. The program also keeps up with "Near Earth objects," or NEOs, which are asteroids that pass close enough to our planet to cause concern. NEOs are hard to survey...
A bright ball of light traveling east to west was seen over the skies of central/northern California Sunday morning, April 22. The former space rock-turned-flaming-meteor entered Earth's atmosphere around 8 a.m. PDT. Reports of the fireball have come in from as far north as Sacramento, Calif. and as far east as North Las Vegas, Nev. Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., estimates the object was about the size of a...
NASA announced a new project on Wednesday that will enlist help from amateur astronomers to discover near-Earth objects (NEOs). The project, known as "Target Asteroids!", will support NASA's Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security - Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. OSIRIS-REx aims to improve basic scientific understanding of NEOs and is scheduled to launch in 2016. NASA is asking amateur astronomers to help better characterize the population of NEOs,...
Protecting the Earth from an extinction-threatening asteroid has in the past been left up to Hollywood, which has deployed a barrage of special effects box office blockbusters that have kept deadly space rocks from smashing our planet into oblivion. But now, Scottish engineers have come up with a plausible way of dealing with asteroids that doesn’t include Hollywood special effects. Engineers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are developing an innovative technique based on...
Latest Planetary defense Reference Libraries
Near-Earth Object -- Near-Earth Objects (NEO) are asteroids, comets and large meteoroids whose orbit intersects Earth's orbit and which may therefore pose a collision danger. Due to their size and proximity, NEO's are also more easily accessible for spacecraft from Earth and are important for future scientific investigation and commercial development. In fact, some near-Earth asteroids can be reached with much less ΔV (change in velocity) than the Moon. In the United States, NASA...
Near-Earth Asteroid -- Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are asteroids whose orbit intersects Earth's orbit and which may therefore pose a collision danger, as well as being most easily accessible for spacecraft from Earth. In fact, some near-Earth asteroids can be reached with much less ΔV than the Moon. The most famous near-Earth asteroid is 433 Eros that was visited by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous probe. A few hundred such near-Earth asteroids are known, ranging in size up...
433 Eros -- The asteroid 433 Eros was named after the Greek god of love Eros. It is an S-type asteroid approximately 13 x 13 x 33 km in size, the second-largest near-Earth asteroid. It was visited by the NEAR Shoemaker probe, which first orbited it taking extensive photographs of its surface and then in 2001 at the end of its mission was landed on the asteroid's surface using only its maneuvering jets. Depending on where they stood on Eros, a person who weighed 200 pounds (90...
