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ABC News
3 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Meet the NASA scientist tasked with identifying asteroids on a collision course with Earth
The bright green meteor that blazed a trail over the skies of southern WA earlier this month served as a spectacular reminder of just how vulnerable the Earth is to threats from space. Country police officer and amateur meteorite hunter Marcus Scott found a tennis ball sized piece of the space rock, dubbed the Mother's Day meteorite, in a salt lake about 460 kilometres east of Perth. Hollywood has taught us to fear giant 'planet killer' asteroids, but it's the smaller space rocks that could destroy an entire city. Thankfully, a NASA scientist is on the case, with the job of protecting the planet against such threats. Dr Kelly Fast oversees NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is responsible for identifying and tracking asteroids, and figuring out if any of these rocky bodies could be on a collision course with Earth. Larger meteors can survive the trip through the atmosphere, often in spectacular fashion, like the Mother's Day meteorite which was estimated to be about half a metre in size. It slammed into the atmosphere above WA travelling at about 15 kilometres a second, before breaking up and landing in a salt lake in the Goldfields. Dr Fast and her colleagues around the world track more than 37,000 near-Earth asteroids, with the US Congress expecting NASA to find 90 per cent of asteroids larger than 140 metres. It's the smaller asteroids that pose the danger because they are harder to find, but could still destroy a land mass the size of an Australian city or even a state. "The asteroid hazard is a global issue. The first order of business is finding asteroids… it's the only natural disaster that you could potentially prevent," she said. Last year an asteroid named 2024 YR4 was discovered, with initial calculations indicating it could come dangerously close to Earth in just seven years' time. With a diameter of approximately 50 metres, if it struck the earth it could cause widespread devastation of a similar scale to the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908. That explosion occurred over a sparsely populated area, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. Dr Fast said there were a few different forms of technology that could potentially be used to neutralise the threat from an asteroid, and they all sound like they are straight out of a science fiction movie. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphous in September 2022, successfully changing the orbit of the 160-metre diameter celestial body. "That was the simplest technique — to impact an asteroid and change its speed, and it was successfully tested with DART," Dr Fast said. To date, it's been the only real world test to save the planet from destruction caused by a rogue space rock. Other techniques being studied include ion beam deflection, using a spacecraft to fire charged particles at the asteroid, giving it a slight nudge to change its orbit. The 'Star Trek' sounding "gravity tractor" is another possible solution, and entails parking an object next to the asteroid and using the slight change in gravity to change its orbit. "And then there's what we always like to call the Hollywood option, because it's what's always used in the movies — a nuclear deflection," Dr Fast said. Although she warned such a technique could create even more of a hazard from the debris field of an exploded asteroid. Dr Fast is hoping there won't be a need to use any of these techniques in our lifetime, but says developing the technology to protect the planet will be a gift for future generations. This week Dr Fast spoke at the Australian Space Awards in Sydney, where she emphasised Australia's importance in keeping the planet safe from the threat of asteroids. And while Australia might be half a world away from NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., two teams of Australian researchers form part of the International Asteroid Warning Network. The University of New South Wales Canberra team search for asteroids using optical telescopes as well as the Parkes Radio Telescope, famous for its role in broadcasting Neil Armstrong's moon walk. On the other side of the country, researchers at the University of Western Australia use the one-metre diameter Zadko Telescope, located about 70 kilometres north of Perth in Gingin, to scan the skies for threats from space. Hollywood-born Dr Fast has a degree in astrophysics and a doctorate in astronomy. She also has the honour of having a nearly three-kilometre diameter space rock named after her, Asteroid Kellyfast. "Like pretty much all asteroids that are named for people, let's hope it stays safely out in the main belt [of space]" she said with a laugh.
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Mars Gets a Close-Up and a Photo Bomb as Europe's Hera Mission Swoops Past
An asteroid-chasing spacecraft just swung past Mars on Wednesday. As it zipped by, it took hundreds of shots of the Red Planet, as well as several snaps of Deimos, one of the two small Martian moons. The operators of the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft were bewitched by the sci-fi aesthetics of the pictures. 'We were waiting with impatience to get these images,' said Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for Hera, during a Thursday news conference at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. When the first shots of the moon appeared, many of the Hera team members burst into cheers. 'We've never seen Deimos in that way,' Dr. Michel said. Navigators managed to fly Hera about 600 miles above Deimos, a craggy moon just nine miles long. The pass shows the object in remarkable detail — a small island gliding above the crater-scarred Martian desert. During the news conference, Ian Carnelli, the Hera project manager, was misty-eyed. 'I'm going to get emotional,' he said. 'The excitement was such that we didn't get any sleep.' Hera was using Mars in what is known as a gravity assist, both accelerating the spacecraft and adjusting its flight path. But its mission operators also wanted to take advantage of the Martian flyby and use it to test the mechanical eyes that will allow Hera to study the asteroid it is targeting, Dimorphos. In the coming days, the mission's scientists will reveal more photographs from Hera's encounter with Mars, which may include shots of Phobos, the planet's other moon. As with any planetary flyby, there were some nerves about whether Hera would conduct its maneuvers properly and end up on the right trajectory. 'The spacecraft behaved very well,' said Sylvain Lodiot, the Hera operations manager. 'We're on track to the asteroid system.' Hera is headed to Dimorphos as a follow-up to a 2022 NASA mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. DART deliberately crashed a spacecraft into that asteroid, aiming to change its orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos. That was a test of whether a dangerous space rock bound for Earth could be deflected in a similar manner. The experiment successfully changed the orbit of Dimorphos. But the asteroid's physical nature, and its full response to DART's collision, remains unclear; some evidence suggests that it acted like a fluid when hit, rather than a solid, causing it to eject a lot of debris and reshape itself. When it comes to stopping lethal asteroids from striking Earth, the more scientists know about their rocky enemies, the better prepared they will be should one come careening our way. To aid that effort, the European Hera mission will arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026 for a close-up study of the DART-impacted asteroid. This Wednesday, during Hera's flyby of Mars and Deimos, the spacecraft used three cameras — including a thermal infrared imager supplied by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Mars's two moons have mysterious origins. Both could be pieces of a disintegrating asteroid captured by the planet's gravity, or perhaps the flotsam and jetsam leftover from a giant impact event on Mars. Deimos is tidally locked, meaning one hemisphere permanently faces Mars. This near side is the one most commonly seen by spacecraft orbiting the planet, or by rovers driving across its surface. Hera managed to fly behind Deimos, meaning it caught a rare sight. 'It's one of the very few images we have of the far side of Deimos,' said Stephan Ulamec, a researcher at the German Aerospace Center and member of the Hera team. This opportunistic peek at Mars and Deimos was exciting. But the team is especially thrilled that Hera is now on its way to its asteroid destination. 'We're all looking forward to what Didymos and Dimorphos will look like,' Dr. Michel said.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
ESA's Hera probe trains its cameras at Mars' moon Deimos
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. During a flyby of Mars on Wednesday (March 12), ESA's Hera spacecraft inaugurated use of its science instruments to image the smaller of the planet's two moons, Deimos. The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its Hera planetary defense mission in 2024 to gather further data about the asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) impacted in 2022. To reach its target, Hera needed a gravity assist by swinging by Mars, which it during a flyby of the red planet on Wednesday, March 12, close pass provided an opportunity for mission managers to power up and test three of Hera's science instruments for the first time. Using the Hyperscout H hyperspectral imager, the probe captured this near infrared photo of Mars and its moon Deimos. Hera was about 620 miles (1000 km) from the 7.7-mile-wide (12.4-m) Martian moon when the image was taken. Deimos orbits approximately 14,600 miles (23,500 km) from the surface of Deimos, at the top of the image, is the bright Terra Sabaea region of Mars, which is close to the planet's equator. Huygen crater is to the bottom right of Terra Sabaea and Schiaparelli crater is to its left. To the bottom right is Hellas Basin, which is among the largest known impact craters in the solar system. Deimos is tidally locked, so the side of the moon in this photo is rarely seen. Hera's Hyperscout H hyperspectral imager makes its observations in a range of hues that are beyond the limits of our eyes. It can view the same target in 25 visible and near-infrared spectral bands, enabling it to better characterize surface materials. Learn more about Hera's flyby of Mars and look back at the spacecraft's launch in 2024. You can also see images of Earth and our moon that Hera captured on its way to deep space.
Voice of America
12-03-2025
- Science
- Voice of America
Methods for Protecting Earth against an Asteroid Strike
Astronomers following asteroid activity in space estimate there is a very small chance an object large enough to destroy a whole city could strike Earth in 2032. But space agency officials say even if such an asteroid keeps heading on a path toward Earth, the world is now much better-equipped to defend itself against such a threat. The American space agency NASA recently estimated there was a 3.1 percent chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 would hit Earth on December 22, 2032. That is the highest probability predicted for such a large space rock in modern times. Richard Moissl is head of the European Space Agency's (ESA) planetary defense office. While recognizing the risk the asteroid could present, he told the French news agency AFP people should not panic over such predictions. Astronomers have noted that the more data they gather, the odds of a direct asteroid hit are expected to keep rising over time. However, scientists say at a certain point the odds will likely drop down to zero. Moissl said he thinks it is important to remember that even in the unlikely event the probability keeps rising to 100 percent, the world is "not defenseless." Here are some methods currently being considered as defensive measures to keep humanity safe in case there is a real threat. Send a spacecraft to hit it Only one planetary defense method has been tried against an asteroid. In 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) sent a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide Dimorphos asteroid. The effort successfully changed the asteroid's orbit around a larger space rock. Bruce Betts is chief scientist for the nonprofit Planetary Society. He told AFP that space agencies could hit the 2024 YR4 asteroid with several spacecrafts, observing how each one changed the path. The asteroid discovered in December is estimated to be 40-90 meters wide -- about half the size of Dimorphos. "You have to take care not to overdo it," Moissl warned. He said this is because if a spacecraft only partly destroys an asteroid, it could send smaller pieces of the space rock heading toward Earth. Non-contact methods A separate idea would involve sending a large spacecraft to fly alongside a threatening asteroid. The spacecraft would not touch the asteroid, but would use its gravitational force to pull it away from Earth. Moissl said another non-contact plan would put a spacecraft near the asteroid to eject a continuous flow of atoms to push the asteroid off course. Scientists have also considered painting one side of the asteroid white. They believe this could increase the light the object reflects to make it slowly change course. Contact methods One idea is to use a nuclear weapon against a threatening asteroid. In laboratory tests, researchers found that X-rays from a nuclear blast could move a rock. But this is considered more of a plan for kilometers-wide asteroids like the one that killed off the dinosaurs. And this method also carries the risk that a nuclear explosion could send additional pieces of the asteroid falling toward Earth. A similar method – but one considered less dangerous – would involve shooting laser beams from a spacecraft to destroy the side of an asteroid in an effort to push it away from Earth. If all else fails Moissl said that if all else fails, at least the world will have a good idea where a threatening asteroid would strike. Since astronomers believe most asteroids would at most threaten to destroy one city, efforts could be organized to get people out of an area before a strike. "Seven-and-a-half years is a long time to prepare," Moissl added. He also noted that even with the rising odds involving 2024 YR4, there is still about a 97 percent chance the asteroid will miss Earth. I'm Jill Robbins. Daniel Lawler with Issam Ahmed reported this story for Agence France-Presse. Jill Robbins adapted it for Learning English. ______________________________________________ Words in This Story asteroid - n. any of the small rocky celestial bodies found especially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter reflect – v. of light or sound. to move in one direction, hit a surface, and then quickly move in a different and usually opposite direction What do you think of this story? Write to us in the Comments Section.
Vox
08-03-2025
- Science
- Vox
Humanity isn't asteroid-proof yet. But we're getting closer.
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. An artist rendering of the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space probe approaching the asteroid Didymos and its minor-planet-moon Dimorphos. Illustration by Nicholas Forder/Future Publishing via Getty Images In 2012, astronaut Ron Garan did an AMA on Reddit. In between questions about aliens (he didn't see any in space) and where his coffee came from (recycled urine), he responded to a question about why we should accept the risks of a future mission to Mars. Garan quoted a colleague: 'If the dinosaurs had a space program, they'd still be here.' Putting aside the unlikelihood of giant reptiles with brains the size of walnuts developing their version of Apollo 11, the point here is that the dinosaurs were almost certainly wiped out by a nearly 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck the Earth with the destructive power of billions of Hiroshima-scale nuclear bombs, causing an 'impact winter' that cut off sunlight and led to drastic cooling far beyond what most dinosaurs could survive. The dinosaurs, of course, could do nothing about the killer asteroid, other than presumably waving their tiny arms at the oncoming doom. But if they did have a space program — and yes, now I'm imagining a T. rex in a space suit, swaggering to a rocket like John Glenn in The Right Stuff — they might have been able to detect that incoming asteroid decades in advance, and done something to avert their doom. Humans, though, are in a better place — as shown by the recent news over an asteroid called 2024 YR4 that briefly appeared to be threatening the Earth. Killer asteroids, briefly explained The Chicxulub asteroid that likely wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't the first time a massive asteroid collided with the Earth. An asteroid 12 to 16 miles wide hit the planet more than 2 billion years ago, in what is now Vredefort, South Africa, while another 6 to 10 miles wide hit what is now Sudbury, Ontario 1.85 billion years ago. More recently, a 130-foot-wide space rock exploded 6 miles above Siberia in 1908, creating a blast strong enough to knock over 80 million trees. Related How to avert an asteroid apocalypse The Earth exists in a cosmic shooting gallery, and while truly civilization-threatening strikes of the kind seen in movies like Deep Impact are incredibly rare, they do happen. And given enough time, they will happen again. Until very recently, were a Chicxulub-sized asteroid to find itself on a collision course with Earth, we wouldn't have been able to do much more than the dinosaurs did. The result would be global firestorms, massive earthquakes, and potentially megatsunamis, followed by an impact winter that would wipe out the global food supply. Very bad stuff. But we're not helpless anymore. Project Icarus Like a lot of cool things, the field of asteroid defense began with a bunch of kids at MIT with brainpower to spare. In 1967, MIT professor Paul Sandorff asked his class to imagine that a real-life asteroid called Icarus, which astronomers had already identified, would hit the Earth in the near-future — and it was their job to devise a way to save the world. (In real life, the asteroid came within 4 million miles of the Earth — 15 times the distance between our planet and moon, but a close shave by cosmic standards.) So was born 'Project Icarus.' The students created a plan to launch six Saturn V rockets, each carrying a 100-megaton nuclear warhead, at the asteroid. The warheads would detonate near the asteroid and create enough force to alter its trajectory and miss the Earth. For all its careful engineering, 'Project Icarus' was largely science fiction; among other inconveniences, the largest nuclear bomb ever made only had a force of 50 megatons. Our space science was so rudimentary at the time that we had no way to reliably identify potentially dangerous asteroids very far in advance, and no real way to deflect them. But Project Icarus put the idea of asteroid defense out into the public. The discovery of the actual Chicxulub crater in 1990, confirming the likely cause of dinosaurs' demise, and the sight of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet walloping Jupiter in 1994, convinced Congress to take the threat of killer asteroids seriously. In 1998, Congress directed NASA to detect and catalog within 10 years at least 90 percent of what are called near-Earth objects (NEOs) that were more than a kilometer wide. NASA and its partners hit that goal with time to spare, and so in 2005, Congress directed the agency to identify at least 90 percent of all NEOs 140 meters or wider — not big enough to end the world, but big enough to destroy a city. Though over 18,000 NEOs have been identified, about 40 every week, there may be a million or more out there. That mission continues. Do look up The recent scare over the asteroid known as 2024 YR4 made this search for killer asteroids so we can knock them off course a bit less academic. (When NEOs are discovered, they are initially given a name that reflects the year of identification, followed by letters and numbers that indicate the order it was identified that year, starting with AA. But the discoverer does get to propose a formal name for it, provided it's less than 16 characters and meets the approval of the International Astronomical Union, which is cool.) 2024 YR4 was discovered on December 27 of last year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — a NASA-funded asteroid detection program with telescopes around the world — at its station in Chile. With an estimated diameter of 130 to 300 feet, it wouldn't be a world-ender, but it could cause severe local damage if it were to collide with the Earth. Which was worrying, because early calculations suggested it had as much as a 3.1 percent chance of striking our planet on December 22, 2032. 3.1 percent may not seem like much of a risk — it's about the same chance as flipping a coin five times and getting all heads or all tails — but it was three times higher than that of any other large known asteroid. For skywatchers this was a big deal. So they swung into action, pulling in data from observatories run by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. Asteroids do offer us the opportunity to stave off at least one kind of planetary disaster because, like all objects in space, they follow a clear and largely predictable orbit. An asteroid impact happens when the orbits of the object and the Earth intersect, like two cars trying to merge onto the highway. Get enough data, do some math, and scientists can figure out with astounding precision whether the Earth will suffer a cosmic fender bender decades into the future. Once the new measurements were taken and the math was done, the probability of YR4 hitting the Earth began to decline, eventually falling to just 0.004 percent. Crisis, such as it was, averted. But while YR4 won't be obliterating any cities, it did provide an invaluable test for planetary defense science — one we passed. Planetary defense Now, what would happen if a big asteroid was confirmed to be on a collision course impact path with Earth? While our asteroid detection systems are way ahead of our asteroid defense systems, there are some options, at least theoretically. Project Icarus had already figured it out back in the 1960s: You don't need to destroy an asteroid to protect the Earth — you just need to give it a slight nudge. Treat it like the eight ball on a pool table, and knock it away. The cue ball in this analogy would be something known as a 'kinetic impactor' — a spacecraft that crashes into the asteroid with enough force to alter its orbit. We know this can work. On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided with the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, more than 7 million miles from Earth. DART was a success, shortening Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes. DART wasn't perfect. The collision also unleashed a swarm of boulders, demonstrating some of the unintended consequences of smashing something into a space rock at roughly 14,760 mph. As the science writer Robin Andrews pointed out on X, DART was proof of principle at best, and not yet something we could use on an asteroid like YR4 if we needed. Of course, a much bigger asteroid that would actually threaten the whole planet would require far, far more force to deflect, and technology we don't yet have. (No, we cannot yet send up oil drillers with a nuclear bomb, like Bruce Willis in Armageddon.) But still. Thanks to brilliant space scientists, international collaboration, and yes, even an act of Congress, our species is closer to being able to permanently protect itself from a natural existential risk that has obliterated the dominant species in our planet's past. If that's not good news, I don't know what is. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
