NASA wants to play rodeo in the stars. An ongoing project to redirect asteroids to a new orbit for study has yielded some candidates, mostly smaller asteroids with loose density. By capturing the asteroids with a manned spacecraft, then redirecting them to the moon’s orbit, NASA hopes to learn more about asteroids, and possibly protect our Earth from collision.
Scientists estimated in the past that the likelihood of a major asteroid strike with the Earth large enough to destroy a city is once every 3000 years. An organization called the B612 Foundation has a very different estimate for this sort of major impact. B612 believes that an asteroid large enough to decimate a city hits the Earth as often as once per century.
With Earth Day round the bend, you’d expect to hear some positive news regarding our planet and the celestial bodies that surround it; instead we have some not-so-good-news. According to former NASA astronauts, we're depending on "blind luck" when it comes to the asteroids avoiding our planet. Apparently we get hit three to ten times more by large-scale asteroids than what is being officially declared by the authorities, this information being brought forward by this trio of space-fairing fellows this week.
The Asteroid Redirect Mission, which has a fairly self-explanatory name, is part of NASA's mission to develop technologies for redirecting and otherwise neutralizing possible asteroid threats. With the mission comes secondary benefits, as well: the early use of technologies needed to send astronauts to Mars and then bring them back.
One of the research areas that NASA is involved in is the Asteroid Redirect Mission. This happens to be one of the key elements of study that hope to put humans on Mars. Although they have their own resources to explore the options, NASA is throwing open their doors to new ideas and creative solutions from folks involved in studies that can help them in their mission.
Last year, NASA introduced its partnership with Planetary Resources and upcoming Grand Asteroid Challenge, which pits humanity against the race to protect our planet from potentially devastating asteroids. On Monday, the space agency will kick off its first contest under the challenge: Asteroid Data Hunter.
If you are the sort that likes to worry about an asteroid hitting the Earth, you have little to fear today. NASA says that the flyby of asteroid 2014 DX110 is a "non-event" but the 90-foot diameter asteroid is going to pass between the orbits of the Earth and the moon this afternoon.
NASA's efforts on the Red Planet have resulted in thousands of images, some more mystifying than others, but few quite as powerful as a high-resolution photograph taken of a fresh asteroid impact. The photo features the resulting crater in the middle, and shows the huge rayed blast zone around it, revealing something akin to blackened sunbeams.
Mars has been a playground for NASA's various robots and missions, and it was back in March that the Curiosity rover found evidence of conditions for habitable life, something that has cropped up in various degrees since then. According to some US researchers, it is possible that rocks containing life could have been blasted, so to speak, to the Red Planet from the Chicxulub impact that took out the dinosaurs and many other strikes.
Scientist have made an amazing discovery in the Chesapeake Bay. A team of researchers were drilling into the center of an ancient asteroid impact crater in the bay. The carter is known as the Chesapeake Bay impact crater and was formed when an asteroid hit the Earth about 35 million years ago.
This past summer, NASA announced the beginning of its Grand Asteroid Challenge with something it calls Grand Challenges, a push by the Obama Administration to further innovations and increase new discoveries. Today the agency has announced its first partnership under this challenge, with NASA penning an agreement with Planetary Resources in Washington state to crowdsource the detection of asteroids.
Japanese space agency JAXA has successfully test fired its "space cannon" that is designed to launch a projectile into asteroid. The space cannon will eventually be mounted inside the Japanese Hayabusa-2 space probe. That space probe is expected to launch in 2014.