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Asteroid Clips From NASA -- Updated
Roughly 199 million miles from where you sit, NASA's NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) Shoemaker has been zeroing in on the asteroid Eros for a little while, taking pictures as well as readings with six on-board instrument systems. Four movies of Eros (QuickTime only) are also available through CNN. From the CNN article: "The performance of the other instruments should improve as well as NEAR Shoemaker moves in closer to the 21-mile-long (34-km-long) rotating space rock. Later in the year, the spacecraft could move in even closer and briefly touch down to conclude its primary mission, scientists said." [Updated 1:30GMT by timothy] Oops -- make that 119 million miles, not 199. I'm always trying to help out NASA.
Roughly 199 million miles from where you sit...
Whoa there, pardner! How could you know where I'm sitting?
I can't down load movies of Eros all over the Internet...
(only funny to those who know Greek)
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Why should we care? Well, for one thing, they can tell us a lot about the origins of the solar system. The sun and all the planets are believed to have acreted from a vast cloud of gas and dust. The asteroids could not coalesce into a planet due to the gravitational effects of Jupiter, thus were halted at the planetesimal stage. They can give us insight into the early process of planet formation.
Also, one day one of these suckers could crash into our planet. If we want to have any hope of preventing that, we will need to understand something about their composition. For example, are they solid bodies or are they composed of small rocks held together by gravitational attraction? makes a big difference if we want to try to deflect one heading our way. There is an excellent article in the May issue of Scientific American (no link, since it doesn't seem to be in the online version) that makes a compelling argument for the rubble pile theory.
I'm also seeing a decent soundtrack and a hot young starlet to keep us all interested - probably wouldn't hurt their funding either.
they were going to attempt to land on Eros to complete the mission. Hmmm...
I wonder if they are going to try to blow it up, maybe that Armageddon movie got them NASA people thinking, hey, if something like that did happen, we really would have to send up some clueless oil workers.
Sorry, I forgot to take my medication today.
Fight the man, Hey wait... I'm the man
There's a JPL writeup/description of the NEAR mission here.
There are plenty of good stills and movies here.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
First of all, all of our pictures of asteroids are from tens of thousands of miles away. The Eros expedition is the first close up inspection of an Asteroid, and it's a necessary next step in freeing ourselves from the danger of exceeding our resources on Earth.
...and being in space for keeps means removing eggs from the basket, which helps our chances at survival.
Asteroid mining can be a reality. For a good book, read 'Mining the Sky'. It discusses the obstacles that need to be overcome, and also illustrates the immense effect asteroid mining can have on our world.
New advances in ultrasonic drilling is reducing the complexity of asteroid sampling devices, and vaccuum smelting processes are being actively pursued. These, plus the scientific observations afforded by the Shoemaker-NEAR spacecraft will make it possible to avoid paying $10,000+ a lb to carry the materials needed to build tomorrows space colonies and industrial space presence.
The types of missions people pay the most attention to are the warm and fuzzy ones like J. Glenn's return to space and the Mars Pathfinder. The missions that will provide the best return on our investment in the future are the Cassini's, the SOHOs, and the Shoemaker-NEAR. They may not be as flashy as a remote control car driving a few feet on Mars, but they provide the type of rock-hard scientific data that's needed to get us into space for keeps.