#asteroids
"In 2005, the United States Congress laid out a clear mandate: To protect our civilization and perhaps our very species, by 2020, the nation should be able to detect, track, catalog, and characterize no less than 90 percent of all near-Earth objects at least 140 meters across."
"As of today, four years after that deadline, we have identified less than half and characterized only a small percentage of those possible threats. Even if we did have a full census of all threatening space rocks, we do not have the capabilities to rapidly respond to an Earth-intersecting asteroid (despite the success of NASA's Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission)."
That bad, huh?
"The reason we have yet to fulfill the congressional mandate is that most NEA)/NEO surveys operate as side hustles for telescopes. For example, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which utilizes a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, primarily focuses on surveying galaxies deep in cosmic history."
"Starting in 2025, NEO searches will get a big boost when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory finally achieves first light. Featuring an 8.4-meter primary mirror, the telescope will image the entire available sky every few nights."
Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid
A really interesting 30 minutes. The precision with which physicists can calculate and manipulate the orbits of these objects is breathtaking.
The Image NASA Didn't Want to Receive from the Deep Impact Probe
Supercut of how NASA crashed into Tempel-1 and visited Wild-2 with the Deep Impact and Stardust probes.
#Orbits of Potentially Hazardous #Asteroids
#Astronomy #Picture of the Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD1J5uZIljI
listen to what #RandalCarson has to say even in the first minutes here^, about #ExtinctionEvents , #Asteroids , #AsteroidImpacts , #Tunguska , #MeteorShowers , #KTBoundary ,
see if you're also, like me, ready to conclude we're already foolishly dangerously overdue for #SpaceShipsForEverybody
and perhaps we should not have been supressing such technologies for a century, and should cease that immediately, regardless the loss of profits from ending that #ManufacturedScarcity for oil corporations and other convergent interests. Regardless our hubris to think we'll catch it all with #Telescopes , what with all these large (multi kilometer) objects only noticed as they pass, not to mention the likes of #Oumuamua that come crossing the plane most looked and least "protected" by the other #planets' #gravity wells, maybe we should avail ourselves every opportunity, not tie our hands behind our back and blindfold us.
#LookUp #Study #Studies
#ShootingGallery #HottingUp #ExtinctionEvent #OverDue #ChancingIt #WhenNotIf
#WeCanStillMendThis
"The system as it is seems to be built on toothpicks"
2 asteroids the size of 22 penguins to pass Earth this weekend - NASA - The Jerusalem Post
Both asteroids 2023 AT and 2023 AE1 are as much as 22 meters wide, meaning 22 emperor penguins. They won't hit us though – penguins are more likely to.
Hahah!
#penguins #asteroids #metric
#Lucy #Launches to Eight #Asteroids
#Astronomy #Picture of the Day
#astronomy #asteroids #KuiperBelt #KBOs An article published in "The Planetary Science Journal" reports a study on some Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that are part of a particular group of which new observations revealed a blue color and a binary nature.
https://english.tachyonbeam.com/2021/09/09/blue-asteroids-may-have-been-pushed-into-the-kuiper-belt-by-neptune/
Researchers identify the source of dinosaur-killing asteroid #Space #Asteroids https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/space/article/Researchers-identify-source-of-dinosaur-killing-16396583.php?
