RenoVous

  Eyes on Asteroids This day marks the anniversary of the Tunguska event in Siberia, 1908. It was the largest impact in recorded history, but as we touched on before, it never actually hit the ground.  It exploded in the air, sending a shockwave that flattened millions of trees across 830 square miles. The largest confirmed impact crater is the Vredefort in South Africa, formed about 2 billion years ago. The Chicxulub crater is buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula, from 66 million years ago.

  Yesterday, after 10 months of flying in space, DART collided with the asteroid, Dimorphos. It was a test of a planetary defense strategy, and while the impact was a success, the team needs to observe the asteroid to confirm its orbit around Didymos has been altered as a result.  They expect it to be shortened by 1%, or 10 minutes. "Beyond the truly exciting success of the technology demonstration, capabilities based on DART could one day be used to change the course of an asteroid to protect our planet and preserve life on Earth as we know it," says Director of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Ralph Semmel. NASA (Also, be sure to search "nasa dart" on Google for a little fun).

  I follow NASA Hubble on Instagram and this was today's post for Asteroid Day, showing their streaks across galaxy cluster Abell 370. This day was designed to educate the public about asteroids and the importance of defending our planet against them. The Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology has put together some online sources to help explain how they track and study asteroids. NASA has sent several spacecraft to study these, such as the Dawn mission in 2007, which explored the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. In 2016, they launched OSIRIS-REx to check out Bennu.  It landed in 2018 and is expected back on Earth in 2023 with samples to evaluate.  Here is the last image it took as it left earlier this year. Out of 730,000 known asteroids about 16,000 are considered near-Earth objects, and these are closely monitored.  The Center for Near Earth Object Studies compiles data acquired by telescopes and submitted to the...

A special thanks to Taha for pointing us in this direction for today! For comparison, the average distance between Earth and our moon is about 239,000 miles. This widget will always display the next 5 approaches within 4.6 million miles - anything larger than 150 meters within that distance is considered a potential hazard. Here's a look at the projected path of the big asteroid swinging by tomorrow. This asteroid is labeled 163348 (2002 NN4), first observed in July 2002. Towards the end of April, a 1.5 mile wide asteroid called 1998 OR2 passed by Earth, but astronomers were monitoring days before, as it traversed through the Hydra constellation. Credit: Dr. Gianluca Masi (Virtual Telescope Project) The Jet Propulsion Lab in California does much more than watch asteroids though.  Current missions include: ASTER  (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) ASO  (Airborne Snow Observatory) Cloudsat  (P...

CNEOS, NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, monitors the sky for potential hazards.  As we started a new year, four asteroids were detected. At least two of those are Apollo asteroids, which are near-Earth, and have a semi-major axis greater than 1 AU (astronomical unit, roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun). Aten asteroids, which the other two were, are also near-Earth but have a semi-major axis less than 1 AU. Asteroid 2020 AD was expected to pass about 556,000 miles away - the moon is 238,855 miles away. Next on approach is Asteroid 2019 UO. Article CNEOS 2020 Watch