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Tiny Satellite Set To Hunt Asteroids
coondoggie writes "Canadian scientists are developing a 143-lb microsatellite to detect and track near-earth asteroids and comets, as well as satellites and space junk. The suitcase-sized Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite includes a 6-inch diameter telescope, smaller than most amateur astronomers' scopes, that by being located 435 miles above the Earth's atmosphere will be able to detect moving asteroids delivering as few as 50 photons of light in a 100-second exposure. The NEOSSat will twist and turn hundreds of times each day, orbiting from pole to pole every 50 minutes, almost always in sunlight. The telescope has a sunshade that allows searching the sky to within 45 degrees of the Sun, in order to detect near-Earth asteroids whose orbits are entirely inside Earth's." The probe was announced a few days before the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska blast.
I'm huntin' asteeroids.
Any technology that can promise to shoot Bruce Willis into space one day is worth pursuing.
(Just get Steve Buscemi back please.)
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Satellite easy to spot, has the 'ass orgy' license plate hanging off it.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Suppose it spots something on a crash course for the Earth, what next? All that will happen is that we know something is heading our way. Bruce Willis is too old to go up to space!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Once the satellite is equipped with a gun, it can shoot the big asteroids into two smaller ones, and each of those asteroids into two even smaller ones. Hitting the smallest ones will make them disappear.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I'd say its more likely that the space junk detection bit will be more useful in the short term, since it'll need a whole lot more then this to stop another one like the Tunguska impactor.
What we need is a way of finding and clearing out the near earth orbitting man made crap so we can reliably place constellations of satellites in orbit, and open up commercial travel.
I want to see active asteroid mining taking place, and for that we need clear skies. Hundreds of ships going up and down a day will mean its absolutely required.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
http://ucalgary.ca/news/june2008/NEOSSat
... THIS is tiny!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It should be noted that this year is the 400th anniversary of the telescope.
Maybe they will soon figure out how to etch a telescope on a circuit board and send swarms of thousands of networked satellites out there to look for these asteroids.
I'm now in Poland: http://williamwnek
I don't know, but you put an extra word in the quote. There is no "fo'".
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'd be surprised if there was not a shocking number of lethal-to-all-life-on-earth sized rocks that almost hit us on a regular basis.
stuff |
Seven hundred years go by, the lonely little satellite still searching fruitlessly for killer asteroids. Then one day, he meets a girl space probe..
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
At least I think we do even for Space.
In the Wired issue on petabyte computing, they mention a telescope that will photgraph the entire sky at ultrahigh resolution every three days. These will be compared to earlier full sky photos to look for NEO etc. This survey acquires terabytes a night, hence inclusion in the article.
It's not hunters, it's WHALERS you insensitive clod.
that's a tiny asteroid hunting satellite.
by the PETA. People for Ethical Treatment of Asteroids.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I checked the Periodic table and couldn't find Klingonium (Kg). I believe it will be discovered somewhere in the 160-190 range of atomic numbers as a metaloid with an irregular "ridged" f orbit electron pair. Mark my words...
Invenio via vel creo
The following article http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/asteroids puts the whole thing in a more somber perspective.
The telescope has a sunshade that allows searching the sky to within 45 degrees of the Sun,
Don't you mean 0.785398 radians?
Step 1) Find NEO's
Step 2) Plant Canadian Flag on NEO's for future mining.
Step 3) Canadian Profit!
Good.. Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun.
Since it's madly spinning around in the depths of space and since any potential Sarah Connors mostly likely aren't in space I don't see this being a major problem.
I thought they call them assteroids nowadays...
Ezekiel 23:20
I'd have thought that with the amount of idle time on telescopes (both professional and amateur), it would be a simple matter to rig captured time lapse images and transit them to a central server, to compare the locations of observed anomalies with those held from historic records, to verify old data and find new NEOs. Seems like a great distributed computing project to me.
My web domain.
Does anyone care to do the math and report back with the percentage of coverage?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Interesting maneuvering method: solar powered magnetic fields -- no fuel needed.
NEOSSat
Telescope: Able to look for objects near the sun - a task virtually impossible to do from Earth.
Extends 30 centimetres.
Weight: 65 kilograms
Power: 45 watts with favourable orientation of solar panels
Propulsion: Solar-powered magnetic "fingers" push against the Earth's magnetic field. It will never run out of propellant.
Orbit: Sun synchronous, 800 km above the Earth, orbiting pole to pole
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
"Don't you mean 0.785398 radians?"
Gosh, no. He means a nice, even pi/4 radians, not some arbitrarily truncated number.
Mod me OT but I just can't take it....
it'll need a whole lot more then this to stop another one
A whole lot more then .... what?
Do you mean that the impact will be greater now then then?
Will it be greater then or less then...
This post was brought to you by the letter "A"
http://clightnirish.wordpress.com/
"Canadian scientists are developing a 143-lb microsatellite to detect and track near-earth asteroids and comets, as well as satellites and space junk."
So when this thing dies it becomes what it was once tracking. Not to say that this may not have value, just sort of ironic that is doomed to become what it observes. (Unless of course it falls out of orbit and burns up in the atmosphere.)
Received its funding from NASA a little while back.
http://orbit.psi.edu/
You can already sign up!
I can just picture it, the final boss shows up...
"That's no space station..."
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Truman (to President): "Well, our object collison budget's about a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
So, we send a soon-to-be-space-junk to track OTHER space junk ? :/