From the category archives:

Asteroid and Comet Deflection

Lutetia Encounter Approaches

July 7, 2010

Asteroids are much in the news these days, with Japanese and European missions returning outstanding photos and information about them. While we await testing on what may be fragments of the asteroid Itokawa from the Hayabusa team, we now prepare for another asteroid flyby on the part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which [...]

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Jupiter Impacts Add Up

June 6, 2010

These days we think of Giovanni Cassini in relation to Saturn, for obvious reasons, but the Italian astronomer (1625-1712) did a lot more than discovering the division in the rings of Saturn that would later bear his name. In addition to his studies of the Saturnian moons, Cassini shares credit for the discovery of Jupiter’s [...]

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OSIRIS-REx: Mission to an Asteroid

March 15, 2010

Why mount a mission to an asteroid? For one thing, some of them cross the Earth’s orbit, and that makes gathering knowledge about their composition essential to any future trajectory-altering operation. For another, the science return could be immense. These are unprepossessing objects, no more than chunks of rock and dust, but they can tell [...]

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Defending the Planet: NRC Final Report

January 22, 2010

I’m looking at the National Research Council’s final report on the detection of near-Earth objects, the culmination of the study that produced the NRC’s interim report last year. Let’s recall the context: It was in 2005 that Congress mandated that NASA find 90 percent of NEOs with a diameter of 140 meters or greater, such [...]

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Updating the Dinosaur Killer

October 22, 2009

Sankar Chatterjee (Texas Tech) and a team of researchers have been looking at something known as the Shiva basin, that area west of India that is heavily laden with oil and gas resources. Chatterjee believes the Shiva basin is in fact a huge, multi-ringed impact crater, one caused by a bolide perhaps as much as [...]

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Asteroids: A Near Miss, An Informative Hit

October 9, 2009

New observations of asteroid Apophis, reported at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Puerto Rico, indicate that the chances of its striking the Earth in 2036 must be recalculated, diminishing from roughly 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 250,000. There goes one disaster scenario, but enter another: An impact possibility exists for the year [...]

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Arecibo in Context: Watching for NEOs

October 1, 2009

Some things to keep in mind with regard to near-Earth objects: NASA is working with a Congressional mandate from 2005 that it discover ninety percent of all NEOs that are 140 meters in diameter or greater. The deadline for this task is 2020, and the interim report Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies (written [...]

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Hunting Asteroids (and Money)

August 17, 2009

A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences points out that NASA has been tasked to locate 90 percent of the most deadly objects that could conceivably strike our planet. Yet only about a third of this assignment has been completed, and the money has yet to be found to complete the job. The [...]

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STEREO: Closing on the Lagrange Points

August 14, 2009

A note the other day from astrodynamics wizard Edward Belbruno (Princeton University) has put me in mind of the ongoing study of the L4 and L5 points being conducted by the STEREO mission. STEREO is a two-spacecraft observatory designed to study solar activity, but in September and October the craft will be making their closest [...]

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Cometary Catastrophe? Not So Fast…

July 30, 2009

Once again we’re asked to reconsider our views about the outer Solar System. In this case, the area in question is the Oort Cloud, which begins at roughly 1000 AU and continues, by some estimates, as far as three light years from the Sun. It’s a spherical cloud of comets, probably numbering in the billions [...]

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