Asteroid explosion over Indonesia

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Thanks Dreemz, this is what I was expecting for around october 9 !!!

thank you for posting, its a big help

Good morning Sir!

yes! yes! I just knew you needed to see this...

so sorry though, was not sure exactly where to post it...

thank YOU! for all your amazing thoughts

keep up the great work! it's astonishingly amazing!

ASTEROID NEAR MISS:

On Nov. 6th at 2132 UT, asteroid 2009 VA barely missed Earth when it flew just 14,000 km above the planet's surface. That's well inside the "Clarke Belt" of geosynchronous satellites. If it had hit, the ~6-meter wide space rock would have disintegrated in the atmosphere as a spectacular fireball, causing no significant damage to the ground. 2009 VA was discovered just 15 hours before closest approach by astronomers working at the Catalina Sky Survey.

spaceweather.com

Two Comets coming in 2010

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Meteor Illuminates the Utah Sky

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Russia Takes Aim at Asteroids
By Michio Kaku
Wall Street Journal,1/6/2010

The dinosaurs never saw what hit them, but humanity can do better. Apophis is a
large asteroid that will make its first pass around the Earth in 2029. It will
come so close that it will travel beneath our communication satellites. The
asteroid could destroy an area almost the size of France, or perhaps the entire
Northeast of the US. The energy of the impact would be roughly 100,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. So scientists are applauding the Russian Space
Agency for proposing to launch a mission to deflect it, even if the danger from
Apophis is very slight. Sooner or later we will face a catastrophic threat from
space. Kaku says if we prepare now, we better our odds of survival.

About the Author
Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, is the
author of "Physics of the Impossible" (Doubleday, 2008) and host of "Sci Fi
Science: Physics of the Impossible" on the Science Channel.

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Cosmic Event – North-America – Canada
January 9, 2010 on 1:01 am | In Disasters | No Comments

EDIS Number: CO-20100109-24478-CAN
Date / time: 09/01/2010 04:58:39 [UTC]
Event: Cosmic Event
Area: North-America
Country: Canada
State/County: Province of Quebec
City: Montreal
Number of Deads: None or unknow
Number of Injured: None or unknow
Damage level: Minor

Description:

A meteor crashing through the Earth’s atmosphere could be responsible for sightings of a fireball over Montreal Thursday night, astronomers said. Montrealer Humberto Dramasino witnessed the sight as he was driving home in the city's St-Laurent district around (07.01.2010) 7:30 p.m. "I saw a fireball just below the clouds," Dramasino said. "It was losing pieces in the air while it was flying and it was very, very fast." The spectacle lasted no more than a few seconds, Dramasino said.

Montreal-based astronomer Andrew Fazekas, who runs the website thenightskyguy.com, confirmed the description of the object matched that of a meteor. Fazekas said he received reports of the fireball from at least five others, including from as far away as Saint-Eustache, about 30 kilometres north of Montreal. Meteors are not unusual but the size of the fireball witnessed over Montreal is less common, Fazekas said. "Meteors happen every night, they tend to be about the size of a grain of sand though," he said. "When you see something that looks like a ball that seems to be on fire, with smoke trailing behind it — those tend to be much larger like a baseball, basketball size, even the size of a tricycle.

"These rocks tend to produce a very spectacular sight," Fazekas said. Fazekas said the reports were even more unusual, because of the heavy cloud cover over the region Thursday night. "That is very rare because most of these meteors, even the ones that produce fireballs are very high up — many kilometres above our heads," he said. Fazekas said he would transmit the reports of the sighting to the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ont., which monitors meteors across Canada.

CURIOUS FLYBY:

A curious object is about to fly past Earth only 130,000 km (0.3 lunar distances) away. Catalogued as a 10m-class asteroid, 2010 AL30 has an orbital period of almost exactly 1 year. This raises the possibility that it might not be a natural object, but rather a piece of some spacecraft from our own planet. At closest approach on Jan. 13th, 2010 AL30 will streak through Orion, Taurus, and Pisces glowing like a 14th magnitude star. Experienced amateur astronomers are encouraged to monitor the flyby.

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Almost-close encounter: Meteorite hits Lorton doctor's office

By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 21, 2010; B03

Much later, after the hole in the roof had been fixed and the debris cleaned up, after the cause of the damage finally had become clear, Frank Ciampi wondered: What are the odds?

He is a doctor. He has worked for 18 years in the two-story building in Lorton that houses the Williamsburg Square Family Practice, in the 9500 block of Richmond Highway. He spends his days walking in and out of examining rooms, seeing patients.

What are the chances, as he goes about his routine, that he'll get hit by a meteorite?

Not impossible.

It almost happened.

"I was in my office doing charts," Ciampi recalled. It was Monday, a little after 5:30 p.m. He was on the building's second floor. "And I heard a loud boom, almost like a small explosion."

At first, he said, he thought a bookcase had toppled nextdoor. "So I ran toward the office. And then I saw all the debris in the hallway," he said.

The floor just outside examination room No. 2 -- about 10 feet from where Ciampi had been doing paperwork -- was littered with small pieces of wood, plaster and insulation. Upon inspection, more debris lay inside the room. He saw three chunks of stone on the floor that together formed a rock about the size of a tennis ball, with a glassy-smooth surface. Then he saw a hole about the size of the rock in the tile ceiling, and a tear in the maroon carpet where the rock had landed.

"The first thing we thought was maybe something had fallen from a plane," Ciampi said.

For most of the day, the 10 examination rooms used by Ciampi and two other medical professionals in the practice had been occupied by patients. Had the falling object crashed through the ceiling a little earlier, it might have killed someone.

"I thank God," Ciampi said.

Later, he said, "I was up all night, wondering what it was." No one else in the practice could figure it out, either. Then on Tuesday, the office manager, Rhonda Lawrence, offered a suggestion from her husband Jeffrey, who has a background in geology.

"Jeff said that maybe it was a meteorite," Ciampi said. "We didn't think of that. You know, a meteorite -- that's not the first thing you think of."

Cari Corrigan, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, confirmed it.

"It's beautiful," she gushed on Wednesday, after examining the rock.

"The first thing we look at is what's called the fusion crust on the outside," she said. "It's kind of a black, shiny coating, because when it passes through the atmosphere, it's melting a little at a time. So it's like an outer layer of glass, of melted rock."

That, plus flecks of metal in the rock, confirmed it had come from space, she said.

Corrigan said small meteorites hit Earth "fairly often." "We're bombarded by stuff like that all the time," she said. Since most of the planet's surface is uninhabited, most meteorites land a long, long way from people. And most of those that do hit inhabited areas go unnoticed, she said.

Every now and then, though, there's a landing like the one in Lorton. She said the meteorite weighs just over a half pound and probably was traveling about 220 mphwhen it hit the building.

If the folks at the medical practice want her to, Corrigan said, she will submit the stone to the Meteorite Nomenclature Committee.

"They'll give it an official name and an official description and it'll go on the books as being an official meteorite," she said. "I would imagine it would be called the Lorton, Va., Meteorite, or something like that."

reminds me of the novel 'the discovery of heaven' from Harry Mulish

Quote:

Scientifically he is on the verge of making a major astronomical discovery. When he discovers heaven (located beyond the Big Bang in negative space), he is killed by a freak meteoroid, sent from heaven by Angel. (In the movie, Gabriel sends the meteor, even after Angel complains and explains that they still need Max.)

The Discovery of Heaven

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When Passing Rocks And Planetry Forces Go Head To Head

Astronomers have worried about the impact that asteroids could have on Earth ever since a theory was proposed in the 1980s that a giant asteroid likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. New research by MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids - and from a distance much larger than previously thought.

By analyzing telescopic measurements of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), or asteroids that come within 30 million miles of Earth, Binzel has determined that if an NEA travels within a certain range of Earth, roughly one-quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon, it can experience a "seismic shake" strong enough to bring fresh material called "regolith" to its surface.

These rarely seen "fresh asteroids" have long interested astronomers because their spectral fingerprints, or how they reflect different wavelengths of light, match 80 percent of all meteorites that fall to Earth, according to a paper by Binzel appearing in the Jan. 21 issue of Nature. The paper suggests that Earth's gravitational pull and tidal forces create these seismic tremors.

By hypothesizing about the cause of the fresh surfaces of some NEAs, Binzel and his colleagues have tried to solve a decades-old conundrum about why these fresh asteroids, known as Q-types, are not seen in the main asteroid belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter.

They believe this is because the fresh surfaces are the result of a close encounter with Earth, which obviously wouldn't be the case with an object in the main asteroid belt. Only those few objects that have ventured recently inside the moon's orbital distance, about one-quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon, and have experienced a "fresh shake" match freshly fallen meteorites measured in the laboratory, Binzel says.

Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, believes Binzel's work is part of a "revolution in asteroid science" over the past five years that considers the possibility that something other than collisions can affect asteroid surfaces.

"For decades, it was thought that the sizes, shapes and spin period of asteroids were all caused by collisions between asteroids, and that this could explain everything that has happened to them in the past 4 billion years," he says. "This work is one more perspective in this revolution of thinking about these very weird rubble piles, and what's affecting them."

The ordinary chondrite problem
Although it is believed that meteorites come from asteroids, astronomers and meteorite scientists have struggled for 30 years to figure out why asteroids matching the majority of all meteorites that fall to the Earth, known as ordinary chondrites, could not be found in space.

The discrepancy emerged when scientists began measuring the spectral fingerprints of meteorites in the lab to determine their mineral constituents based on how they reflect light of different wavelengths. Around the same time, astronomers began using telescopes to measure how asteroids reflect light of varying wavelengths. Because meteorites are thought to originate from asteroids, it was expected that the spectral fingerprints would match.

Instead, scientists found asteroids with spectral fingerprints that were muted and had a reddish tint. These asteroids, known as S-types, appear "sunburned," according to Binzel, due to the space weathering process of solar wind that physically damages their mineral structure.

It wasn't until last year that astronomers could estimate the exposure time of the space weathering process when co-author Pierre Vernazza determined that it takes solar wind a million years to redden an asteroid. "In astronomy, this is nothing, it's like yesterday," Binzel explains. Vernazza's findings, he notes, suggested that astronomers should never see fresh asteroids, since the weathering process is so "brief."

And yet they've been observing Q-types among NEAs for 25 years - suggesting there is something about their proximity to Earth that freshens their surface at a rate that is faster than the space weathering process. That something, Binzel believes, is the seismic shake-up caused by Earth's tidal stress and gravitational pull.

Making the connection
For a decade, Binzel's team has used a large NASA telescope in Hawaii to collect information on NEAs, including a huge amount of spectral fingerprint data. Using this data, as well as estimates based on numerical calculations, Binzel's team examined where a sample of 95 NEAs had been during the past 500,000 years, tracing their orbits to see how close they'd come to Earth. They discovered that 75 NEAs in the sample had passed well inside the moon's distance within the past 500,000 years, including all 20 Q-types in the sample.

Using a calculation known as Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance (MOID), Binzel next determined that an asteroid traveling within a distance equal to 16 times the Earth's radius (about one-quarter of the distance to the moon) appears to experience vibrations strong enough to create fresh surface material. He reached that figure based on his finding that one-quarter of NEAs are fresh, as well as two known facts - that space weathering can happen in less than one million years, and that about one-quarter of all NEAs come within 16 Earth radii in one million years.

Before now, people thought an asteroid had to come within one to two Earth radii, a distance known as the Roche limit, to undergo significant physical change.

Shaking up asteroid seismology
Many details about the shaking process remain unknown, including what exactly it is about Earth that shakes the asteroids, and why this happens from a distance as far away as 16 Earth radii. What is certain is that the conditions depend on complex factors such as the velocity and duration of the encounter; the asteroid's shape, internal structure, surface gravity and rotation rate; and the nature of the preexisting regolith. "The exact trigger distance depends on all those seismology factors that are the totally new and interesting area for cutting edge research," Binzel says.

Further research might include computer simulations, ground observations and sending probes to look at the surfaces of asteroids. "We don't know yet what more than a handful of these objects look like," Chapman says of the Q-types. He predicts theoreticians will put together models about the behavior of these asteroids to help scientists better understand Binzel's research.

Binzel's next steps will be to try to discover counterexamples to his findings or additional examples to support it. He may also investigate whether other planets like Venus or Mars affect asteroids that venture close to them.

His research will be tested in 2029 when the asteroid Apophis is expected to travel within a distance equal to six times the Earth's radius. Anyone with binoculars in Europe or Africa will be able to conduct a simple test to see whether the close encounter makes the surface of the weathered asteroid appear less red. "It should certainly be changed in this fashion if the Binzel observation is interpreted correctly," Chapman says.

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updated january 25



Asteroid Detection, Deflection Needs More Money, Report Says

Are we ready to act if an asteroid or comet were to pose a threat to our planet? No, says a new report from the National Research Council. Plus, we don't have the resources in place to detect all the possible dangerous objects out there. The report lays out options NASA could follow to detect more near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could potentially cross Earth's orbit, and says the $4 million the U.S. spends annually to search for NEOs is insufficient to meet a congressionally mandated requirement to detect NEOs that could threaten Earth. "To do what Congress mandated NASA to do is going to take new technology, bigger telescopes with wider fields," said Don Yeomans, Manager of NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office, speaking at the American Geophysical Union conference last month.

However, Yeomans said work is being done to improve the quality and quantity of the search for potentially dangerous asteroids and comets. "We have a long term goal to have three more 1.8 meter telescopes," he said, "and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope with an 8.4 meter aperture in 2016. Once these new facilities are in place, the data input will be like drinking from a fire hose, and the rate of warnings will go up by a factor of 40."

But getting all these facilities, and more, online and running will take continued and additional funding.

Congress mandated in 2005 that NASA discover 90 percent of NEOs whose diameter is 140 meters or greater by 2020, and asked the National Research Council in 2008 to form a committee to determine the optimum approach to doing so. In an interim report released last year, the committee concluded that it was impossible for NASA to meet that goal, since Congress has not appropriated new funds for the survey nor has the administration asked for them.

But this issue isn't and shouldn't be strictly left to NASA, said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, also speaking at the AGU conference. "There's the geopolitical misconception that NASA is taking care of it," he said. "They aren't and this is an international issue."

Schweickart said making decisions on how to mitigate the threat once a space rock already on the way is too late, and that all the decisions of what will be done, and how, need to be made now. "The real issue here is getting international cooperation, so we can — in a coordinated way — decide what to do and act before it is too late," he said. "If we procrastinate and argue about this, we'll argue our way past the point of where it too late and we'll take the hit."

But this report deals with NASA, and committee from the NRC lays out two approaches that would allow NASA to complete its goal soon after the 2020 deadline; the approach chosen would depend on the priority policymakers attach to spotting NEOs. If finishing NASA's survey as close as possible to the original 2020 deadline is considered most important, a mission using a space-based telescope conducted in concert with observations from a suitable ground-based telescope is the best approach, the report says. If conserving costs is deemed most important, the use of a ground-based telescope only is preferable.

The report also recommends that NASA monitor for smaller objects, and recommends that immediate action be taken to ensure the continued operation of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and support a program at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. Although these facilities cannot discover NEOs, they play an important role in accurately determining the orbits and characterizing the properties of NEOs.

Schweikart quoted Don Yeomans as saying the three most important things about asteroid mitigation is to find them early, find them early and find them early.

"We have the technology today to move an asteroid," Schweikart said. "We just need time. It doesn't take a huge spacecraft to do the job of altering an asteroid's course. It just takes time. And the earlier we could send a spacecraft to either move or hit an asteroid, the less it will cost. We could spend a few hundred million dollars to avoid a $4 billion impact."

But the report put out by the NRC stresses the methods for asteroid/comet defense are new and still immature. The committee agreed that with sufficient warning, a suite of four types of mitigation is adequate to meet the threat from all NEOs, except the most energetic ones.

• Civil defense (evacuation, sheltering in place, providing emergency infrastructure) is a cost-effective mitigation measure for saving lives from the smallest NEO impact events and is a necessary part of mitigation for larger events.
• "Slow push" or "slow pull" methods use a spacecraft to exert force on the target object to gradually change its orbit to avoid collision with the Earth. This technique is practical only for small NEOs (tens of meters to roughly 100 meters in diameter) or possibly for medium-sized objects (hundreds of meters), but would likely require decades of warning. Of the slow push/pull techniques, the gravity tractor appears to be by far the closest to technological readiness.
• Kinetic methods, which fly a spacecraft into the NEO to change its orbit, could defend against moderately sized objects (many hundreds of meters to 1 kilometer in diameter), but also may require decades of warning time.
• Nuclear explosions are the only current, practical means for dealing with large NEOs (diameters greater than 1 kilometer) or as a backup for smaller ones if other methods were to fail.

Although all of these methods are conceptually valid, none is now ready to implement on short notice, the report says. Civil defense and kinetic impactors are probably the closest to readiness, but even these require additional study prior to reliance on them.

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The First of Many Asteroid Finds for WISE
01.22.10

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has spotted its first never-before-seen near-Earth asteroid, the first of hundreds it is expected to find during its mission to map the whole sky in infrared light.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by WISE Jan. 12. After the mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars, researchers followed up and confirmed the discovery with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter (88-inch) visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea.

The asteroid is currently about 158 million kilometers (98 million miles) from Earth. It is estimated to be roughly 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter and circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of our solar system. The object comes as close to the sun as Earth, but because of its tilted orbit, it is not thought to pass near our planet. This asteroid does not pose any foreseeable impact threat to Earth, but scientists will continue to monitor it.

WISE, which began its all-sky survey on Jan. 14, is expected to find about 100-thousand previously undiscovered asteroids in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids. It will also spot millions of new stars and galaxies.

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