What's Up? The Space Place

Hey Space Placers! Read the latest about humanity's fight against asteroids that threaten us. Hyabusa 2 Credit: ESA Really important also in this fight is detection - you can't fight them if you can't see them coming. Important to detection is NASA's NEOCam .   It will detect many Near Earth Objects (NEOs) especially those that we cannot see from Earth due to the Sun. Dr. Amy Mainzer has been working on  NEOCam and has also been the Primary Investigator for  NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission.  Comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto as imaged in multiple exposures of infrared light by the NEOWISE space telescope. The infrared images were taken on Feb. 25, 2019, when the comet was about 56 million miles, or 90 million kilometers, from Earth. C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto is a long-period comet originally from the Oort Cloud and coming in near the Sun for the first time in over 1,000 years. Appearing as a string of red dots, this come...

Hey Space Placers! We continue to learn more about our solar system almost every single night. Here is the latest binary asteroid  . Range-Doppler radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2016 AZ8 with range resolution (vertical axis) of 7.5 m/pixel and Doppler frequency resolution (horizontal axis) of 0.03 Hz where (left) is the sequence of images over the almost 40 min of data and (right) is the first frame, obtained over about 3 min. Pretty amazing what we can see with radar on these worlds. Sky Guy in VA

Hey Space Placers! Get the Daily Minor Planet    delivered to your inbox daily for all the good info on asteroids. Sky Guy recommended! Sky Guy in VA

Hey Space Placers! Asteroids are getting more headlines today - 3-5-14 - as 2014 DX110 (don't you love these designations???!!!!!) will pass about 217,000 miles from Earth at about 4:06 p.m. EST. There was another asteroid that flew by at over 2.5 million miles from us today. Both of these asteroids are about the same size or a little larger than Chelyabinsk and have been discovered in the past few days. You can tune in to watch this flyby here   at 4:00 p.m. EST. What will really get people's attention is the official announcement that just came out as I am writing this blog about the newly discovered asteroid  2014 EC  that is due to flyby Earth tomorrow at 38,500 miles - that's very close - at 4:29 p.m. EST. Depending on its composition our atmosphere would likely break it up and possibly meteorites would be produced. It would be one heck of a bright fireball but it will safely pass. Another asteroid, VE1E9BE is due to flyby   later tonight at ...

Hey Space Placers! A just published article states that the Earth had 70 asteroid impact hits on the level o,f or even larger than, the dinosaur killing impact event 65 million years ago. This is a significant increase in the number of "mega-hits" the Earth was thought to have endured  1.8 to 3.8 billion years ago. The Moon is thought to have been hit 4 times with the same size impactors. The research was based on findings in Australian rock samples and computer studies. As stated by NASA: "Evidence for these impacts on Earth comes from thin rock layers that contain debris of nearly spherical, sand-sized droplets called spherules. These millimeter-scale clues were formerly molten droplets ejected into space within the huge plumes created by mega-impacts on Earth. The hardened droplets then fell back to Earth, creating thin but widespread sedimentary layers known as spherule beds. The new findings are published today in the journal Nature ." “The beds speak to...

Hey Space Placers! We will have a CLOSE flyby of an asteroid discovered just this past Wednesday, on June 27th at about 1 pm EDT. As stated in the following Sky and Telescope article, "Asteroid 2011 MD, a chunk of rock estimated to be 25 to 55 feet (8 to 18 m) across, is expected to pass less than 8,000 miles above Earth's surface." While that IS close, we have had "close encounters of the closest kind" - an impact of a newly discovered asteroid. That happened in 2008 and was the first time in history that a discovered asteroid went on to hit Earth. Meteorites were recovered from that event as well. Once again we are reminded of the real threat that asteroids pose to our planet. While this space rock was spotted and determined to pose no threat to us this time around as well as 2022, there are literally thousands of unknown space rocks out there that might pose a threat. Fortunately this rock is small enough that it would PROBABLY break up in our atmosp...

Hey Space Placers, Asteroids have been in the news lately and now one of their icy relatives, Comet Hartley 2, is making a big splash in the astronomical and spaceflight communities – including our very own University of Maryland (UMD). This comet will not be a crowd pleaser as Comet Hale-Bopp was back in the late ‘90’s as it will be barely visible in the night sky. But that doesn’t mean it will not be of immense historical and scientific importance. Comets are the left over debris, along with asteroids, from the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. These two classes of solar system objects are thought to be related as comets and asteroids can exhibit characteristics indicative of one another. Some asteroids could be "dead" comets in that they have lost all of the volatile and icy material that makes up comets while some comets are covered with significant layers of dust. Just recently two asteroids were found to contain water, a major component of comets...

Since we have been talking about asteroids the past two days, check this out..... Look at this sci-fi-ish photo: Astronomers think that HST has captured detailed images of what happens when two space rocks (asteroids) collide. The images were taken over a period of time and show the changes occuring within the collision remnant. After some detective work astronomers think the collision occurred early last year and involved a smaller asteroid slamming into a larger one. The discovery photos looked all the world like a comet but HST showed the bizzarre and never before seen "X" pattern which ruled out the object being a comet. The astro-collision took place in the busy solar system byway of the asteroid belt where millions of space rocks orbit the Sun. Such collisions are thought to take place about once a year but this is the first ever photo of such an event. Astronomers will look in on this "X-File" object next year to see how the crash scene is progr...

NASA NEO Graphic showing the path of 2010 TD54 With additional observations the path of today's (Oct 12th) close flyby of mini-asteroid 2010 TD54 was refined. Singapore was the area where closest approach took place at 6:50 a.m. EDT. The space rock passed at a distance of 27, 960 miles above the surface of our planet. 2010 TD54 was discovered on October 9th at 3:55 a.m. EDT) during a routine sky patrol by a telescope of the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey north of Tucson, Arizona. NASA has several telescopes dedicated to finding Nearth Earth Objects (NEO's) that could pose a threat to our planet.   Although this space rock did not pose a threat to our planet, it still carried quite a punch. If it had entered our atmosphere it would have probably disintegrated into pieces that might have survived to become meteorites. It also could have exploded high in the atmosphere with the force of a small nuclear detonation or the equivalent of tens of thousands of ton...