Gordon Bennett! (ducks) Asteroid Fly-By

[Delta4Embassy]

In addition to the anticipated 31m asteroid fly-by yesterday, a newly discovered 10m is passing us by four times as close at 0.2 LD (1 LD = ~384K km.) In asteroid terms very close.

SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

"ANOTHER ASTEROID FLYBY: For the second time in as many days, an asteroid is flying through the Earth-Moon system. Yesterday, March 5th, 30-meter asteroid 2014 DX110 passed just inside the orbit of the Moon--about 0.9 lunar distances away. Today, March 6th, 10-meter asteroid 2014 EC is coming even closer--only 0.2 lunar distances. Neither space rock poses an immediate threat to Earth. According to NASA, asteroids thread the Earth-Moon system more than 20 times a year."

 

[ScienceRocks]

Time to make asteroid defense part of our national defense. We need a system to protect nation from the threat of asteroids....

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Agreed. Tricky proposition though, but not impossible. Detection being the hard part. Then destruction being as difficult if not more so above a certain size. Nuclear weapons don't do in space what they do in the atmosphere. And ya wouldn't wanna use them inside the atmosphere because of EMP effects and radiation. A network of railguns would work. Kinetic impact energy is all you'd really need for these 'smaller' sorta ones.

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd got his tin-foil hardhat on just in case...

Risk of asteroid hitting Earth higher than thought, study shows
23 Apr.`14 - The chance of a city-killing asteroid striking Earth is higher than scientists previously believed, a non-profit group building an asteroid-hunting telescope said on Tuesday.

A global network that listens for nuclear weapons detonations detected 26 asteroids that exploded in Earth's atmosphere from 2000 to 2013, data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization shows. The explosions include the February 15, 2013, impact over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which left more than 1,000 people injured by flying glass and debris. "There is a popular misconception that asteroid impacts are extraordinarily rare ... that's incorrect," said former astronaut Ed Lu, who now heads the California-based B612 Foundation.

The foundation on Tuesday released a video visualization of the asteroid strikes in an attempt to raise public awareness of the threat. Asteroids as small as about 131 feet - less than half the size of an American football field - have the potential to level a city, Lu told reporters on a conference call "Picture a large apartment building - moving at Mach 50," Lu said. Mach 50 is 50 times the speed of sound, or roughly 38,000 mph. NASA already has a program in place that tracks asteroids larger than 0.65 mile. An object of this size, roughly equivalent to a small mountain, would have global consequences if it struck Earth.

An asteroid about 6 miles in diameter hit Earth some 65 million years ago, triggering climate changes that are believed to have caused the dinosaurs - and most other life on Earth at the time - to die off. "Chelyabinsk taught us that asteroids of even 20-meter (66-foot) size can have substantial effect," Lu said. City-killer asteroids are forecast to strike about once every 100 years, but the prediction is not based on hard evidence.

B612 intends to address that issue with a privately funded, infrared space telescope called Sentinel that will be tasked to find potentially dangerous asteroids near Earth. The telescope, which will cost about $250 million, is targeted for launch in 2018. B612 takes its name from the fictional planet in the book "The Little Prince," by French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The video can be seen on the B612 Foundation website https://b612foundation.org/

Risk of asteroid hitting Earth higher than thought, study shows

 

[waltky]

Put Granny onna cannon an' she could shoot it outta the sky...

NASA to test asteroid deflection method for 'planetary defense'
Monday 3rd July, 2017 - The team will fly a refrigerator-sized spaceship directly into an asteroid to change its trajectory

NASA unveiled a plan Friday to try to redirect an asteroid by flying a spaceship directly into one. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is a method for changing the path of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Essentially, it consists of flying a refrigerator-sized spaceship directly into the asteroid itself, something NASA calls the “kinetic impactor technique.” The test was recently approved by the agency to move from concept development to preliminary design phase, which includes the test itself. “This approval step advances the project toward an historic test with a non-threatening small asteroid,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a NASA press release.

Artist concept of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft. DART, which is moving to preliminary design phase, would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defense​

DART will target an asteroid that will pass by Earth in October 2022 and again in 2024. The asteroid, called Didymos (Greek for “twin”) is actually a binary system of two distinct bodies: Didymos A, which is about 780 metres long, and Didymos B, at 160 metres long. While astronomers watch from Earth, DART will crash directly into Didymos B at a blinding six kilometres per second — nine times faster than a bullet. “A binary asteroid is the perfect natural laboratory for this test,” Tom Statler, program scientist for DART at NASA Headquarters, said in the release. “The fact that Didymos B is in orbit around Didymos A makes it easier to see the results of the impact, and ensures that the experiment doesn’t change the orbit of the pair around the sun.”

NASA notes in the release that asteroids hit Earth on a near-daily basis, but we don’t tend to notice them because they tend to burn up in the atmosphere. DART is for space rocks that, if they were to hit the planet, would cause substantial damage. It’s important to test the method on a real asteroid, according to DART investigation co-lead Andy Cheng, because scientists don’t know enough about their composition to visualize the results through calculations alone. “DART is a critical step in demonstrating we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact,” Cheng said in the release. “With DART, we can show how to protect Earth from an asteroid strike with a kinetic impactor by knocking the hazardous object into a different flight path that would not threaten the planet.”

NASA to test asteroid deflection method for ‘planetary defense’