Home » Posts tagged 'asteroid'

Tag Archives: asteroid

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth

April 27, 2024

How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth

The potentially hazardous asteroid is on its way for an uncomfortably close flyby of Earth in 2029.

This is radar image of a near-Earth asteroid similar to Apophis. We actually know very little about what Apophis looks like, but its pending flyby in 2029 will provide scientists with an unprecedented look.
This is radar image of a near-Earth asteroid similar to Apophis. We actually know very little about what Apophis looks like, but its pending flyby in 2029 will provide scientists with an unprecedented look.
Image: NASA/JPL-CalTech

In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit.

Apophis is a on trajectory towards an Earth flyby on April 13, 2029. When it was first discovered in 2004, the 1,100-foot-wide (335 meters) near-Earth object was designated as a hazardous asteroid that could impact our planet. Later observations, however, reassured scientists that there’s no need to panic just yet, and that the asteroid has no chance of crashing into Earth for at least another century.

That’s very good news given the size of this object and the serious damage it would inflict should it some day strike our planet. Hopefully that’ll never happen, but objects of this size tend to hit Earth about once every 80,000 years, unleashing catastrophic damage and global-scale impact winters.

Images of Apophis captured by radio antennas at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex in California and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia when the asteroid was 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) away.
Images of Apophis captured by radio antennas at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex in California and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia when the asteroid was 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) away.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech and NSF/AUI/GBO

During its upcoming flyby, scientists want to explore the asteroid to determine whether Earth’s gravitational field will have an impact on Apophis’ orientation, composition, and spin…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NASA Prepares For “The God of Chaos” Asteroid to Arrive

May 3, 2019

NASA PREPARES FOR “THE GOD OF CHAOS” ASTEROID TO ARRIVE

NASA is already beginning preparations for the arrival of the asteroid called “The God of Chaos.”  The asteroid is said to be approaching Earth and will come close to our planet in 2029.

The asteroid’s official name is 99942 Apophis. It is a 1,110-foot-wide asteroid named after the Egyptian god of chaos.  It will fly as close to the Earth as some of the orbiting spacecraft panicking scientists.

99942 Apophis will come within 19,000 miles of Earth on April 13, a decade from now, but scientists at the Planetary Defense Conference are already preparing for the encounter, Newsweek reported. They plan to discuss the asteroid’s effects on Earth’s gravity, potential research opportunities and even how to deflect an incoming asteroid in a theoretical scenario.

The asteroid will be visible to the naked eye and will look like a moving star point of light, according to NASA. It will pass over the United States in the early evening, according to WUSA 9. 99942 Apophis was discovered in 2004 and, after tracking it for 15 years, scientists say the asteroid has a 1 in 100,000 chance of striking Earth decades in the future. But in the fairly distant future: after 2060, Newsweek reported.

Asteroid preparation has become quite a hobby for NASA.

NASA is going to be using a simulation of an “asteroid apocalypse” in order to help the space agency prepare for the cataclysmic event. And they are taking it seriously, as disaster planners from FEMA will join NASA for a dress rehearsal of doomsday.

International partners, including the European Space Agency (ESA), will also be a part of the simulation. The drill is said to be a  “tabletop exercise” that will simulate just how a planetary asteroid emergency would play out in real time. Although an emergency on this scale has never happened, and factors such as the location of impact will have a massive effect on the response to such a globally catastrophic event.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A House-Sized Asteroid Will ‘Skim By’ Earth In A Matter Of Days

October 3, 2017

A House-Sized Asteroid Will ‘Skim By’ Earth In A Matter Of Days

asteroid

On October 12, an asteroid the size of a house will barely miss earth as it skims by at a distance of 27,000 miles. This will be a close call considering the size of the otherworldly body.

Asteroid 2012 TC4 will skim by earth a little too close for comfort. The latest observations, made on July 27, 31, and then again on August 5, revealed 2012 TC4 will pass within one-eighth of the moon’s distance from the planet.

Scientists believe it will shave past Earth at a distance of around 44,000 kilometers. That’s only 27,300 miles. With this close approach, NASA will have the opportunity to test its network of observatories for its planetary defense system, in case an asteroid did actually hit Earth.

“Scientists have always appreciated knowing when an asteroid will make a close approach to and safely pass the Earth because they can make preparations to collect data to characterize and learn as much as possible about it,” said Dr. Michael Kelley, a scientist working on the NASA TC4 observation campaign. “This time we are adding in another layer of effort, using this asteroid flyby to test the worldwide asteroid detection and tracking network, assessing our capability to work together in response to finding a potential real asteroid threat.”

Scientists tracked the house-sized asteroid using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. While they had expected the TC4 asteroid to pass by earth, they weren’t certain how close it would actually come.

“It’s damn close,” said Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. But that’s also far enough away that it will miss all of the geostationary satellites currently in orbit. “The farthest satellites are 36,000 kilometers (22,400 miles) out, so this is indeed a close miss,” he told AFP. “As close as it is right now, I think this prediction is pretty safe, meaning that it will miss.”

The asteroid was still very far from Earth, about 35 million miles at the time of the latest observations. It is traveling at speeds of around 30,000 mph (14 km per second).

 

What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think)

July 10, 2015

What killed the dinosaurs? (hint: probably not what you used to think)

In Walt Disney’s movie “Fantasia” (1940), dinosaurs were shown as dying in a hot and dry world, full of active volcanoes. Recent discoveries show that something like that might really have happened and that the idea that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroidal impact appears to be incompatible with the available data. Rather, it seems that the dinosaurs died out because of the global warming resulting from the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases from volcanoes. In several respects, it is not unlike what’s happening today to us.

I know what you are thinking: these silly scientists; first they tell us that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, now they tell us that it is not true. So, how can we believe them when they tell us that humans are causing global warming? 

On this, I have to tell you something: science is a mighty truth-seeking juggernaut. Yes, individual scientists are not immune from mistakes, political biases, and human failures, but, on the whole, science manages to filter away bad ideas and keep the good ones. The case of the extinction of the dinosaurs is a beautiful example of how well the mechanism works. 

As you will read in the article below, the non avian dinosaurs, it seems, went away not with an asteroidal bang, but with a volcanic whisper. They were killed over several tens of thousands of years by the global warming created by the emission of gases from the giant basaltic eruption known as the “Deccan Traps”, today located on the Indian subcontinent. To be sure, the discussion is far from being settled and many scientists still favor the impact theory (e.g. Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink in their recent book “A new history of life“). Personally, I am no specialist in these matters but, if I did my homework well (and I think I did), my impression is that the data overwhelmingly favor the volcanic hypothesis over the asteroidal one.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress