Russian Scientists have released data indicating a large 60-meter asteroid (2012 DA14) is plummeting towards earth with an expected collision date by February 2013 stating, “[sic]… time to build a spaceship to confront it, has run out.”
Researchers are now considering utilizing one of two methods to divert the potential disaster first, to “paint” the asteroid causing it cool down hopefully causing the killer asteroid to avert course, or to utilize “big guns” to knock the asteroid off course propelling it past the earth’s gravitational field averting a collision with the planet.
The asteroid was spotted nearly three years go by a group of “stargazers” from Spain at a distance of 16,700 miles closer than the orbit of geosynchronous satellites utilized for global positioning instruments.
The power of the asteroid upon impact would be equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb however, scientists have not been able to “pinpoint” a possible strike zone. An asteroid strike in Siberia in 1908 of this magnitude knocked down trees over an 830 sq mile area.
Russian scientists have rejected the “painting” method, as they fear it would simply put the strike off until sometime around the year 2056.
There is still a possibility the asteroid could “split” upon entry into the earth’s atmosphere creating a spectacular “light and fireworks” show. Unfortunately, building a spacecraft designed to “crash” into the asteroid would take nearly two years and time has certainly run out for that option.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s data indicates the 60-meter asteroid will “whistle” by the Earth in 11 months on trajectory that would bring the giant space rock with in a “hair’s breadth” of the planet raising their concerns of a possible collision however, have not released any conclusive statement indicating a direct hit is imminent.
Posted by WNV Headline News
on March 4, 2012. Filed under Breaking News,Earth Sciences,Headline News,Science and Tech,Solar,WorldNewsVine.
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Mehmet
June 26, 2012 at 4:09 pm
a.Why are Near Earth Objects(NEO’S) important? A near Earth ocjebt is an asteroid, comet, or meteroid whose orbit takes it within a close proximity to Earth. By definition near Earth ocjebts have orbits that lie between .983 and 1.3 astronomical units(AU) away from the Sun. The first known NEO, 433 Eros, was visited by the APLbuilt Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) Shoemaker spacecraft in 2001. A second NEO, 25143 Itokawa, was visited by the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft in 2005. The compositions of NEOs cover a range from icy ocjebts that have spent billions of years at temperatures of 50 K or less to metallic shards that originated at the heart of a molten mini-planet. There is obvious interest in NEOs in order to understand the threat they pose and the resources they promise, but they carry a rich bounty of scientific information as well.Asteroids and comets preserve information about the earliest times in solar system history, information long lost from larger planets that have experienced volcanoes, erosion, and tectonic events.NEOs provide a bridge between the macroplanetaryscale studies of small bodies and the microlaboratoryscale studies of meteorites. All meteorites are NEOs until they enter the atmosphere , so NEOs offer the opportunity to study much larger versions of meteorites under pristine conditions.Some NEOs are easier to reach than the Moon, and a typical NEO is much easier to reach than a typical main-belt asteroid. Objects that formed at a variety ofsolar distances currently find themselves in near-Earth space, and a current orbit, combined with physical properties, can give a good sense of where an ocjebt originated, which allows study of these nearby ocjebts to gain insight into the outer reaches of the solar system. The most interesting endgame for NEOs, at least for most humans, is Earth impact. The Earth is under constant bombardment from a rain of extraterrestrialmaterial. In a typical year, Earth is impacted by 54 tons of material, most of it the size of dust grains, that does not penetrate deeper than the high atmosphere. However, Earth is hit with ocjebts the weight of dollar coins or heavier roughly 100 times a day. Objects the size of marbles burn up in the atmosphere and are responsiblefor meteors, or “shooting stars,” which can occur either randomly or in periodic, predictable meteor showers. Chair- to table-sized ocjebts often strike Earth after spectacular fireballs, and fragments can survive to reach the ground as meteorites.The study of meteorites has given us profound insights into the earliest times of solar system history and the processes that continue on parent bodies to this day. Becausemeteorites were necessarily NEOs for some period of time until they impacted Earth, the NEO population should reflect the meteorite population as well as the asteroid (and comet) populations from which they were originally drawn. The extent to which the NEO population differs from these other populations can be used to understand the biases in discovery and the relative importance of delivery mechanisms. Dynamical studies have recently provided a statistical means of tracing NEOs back to their source regions. The result is a set of probabilities associating a given ocjebt with a givenpart of the solar system, which can be combined with other evidence to provide a most likely formation location for each body. This, in turn, allows scientific study of NEOs to provide context for both the meteorites studied in terrestrial laboratories and the regions of the solar system where they originated.
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