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WISE Discovers 95 New Near-Earth Asteroids
astroengine writes "NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up 25,000 new asteroid discoveries, 95 of which are near-Earth objects (NEOs). This mission is as fascinating as it is frightening. Capable of spotting any cosmic object glowing in infrared wavelengths, WISE has become an expert asteroid hunter, seeing these interplanetary vagabonds, some of which get uncomfortably close to our planet."
I'd rather know it's my last chance to see people than not get that chance.
Also, first?
It's WISE systems Astetoids 95's!
Did anyone ever use WISE brand monitors or terminals in the early 90's? What about WISE brand potato chips? Guys, there are so many things called WISE, I just think you should be more specific. Or buy me some awesome potato chips or dumb terminals!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The discovery of additional Near Earth Asteroids isn't scary at all. We knew these objects almost certainly had to be there. We didn't know where exactly they were. Now we can go and track their orbits and if anyone gets close to being a threat maybe have some small chance at dealing with it or preparing for the really bad results if we can't deal with it. This is a good thing. Not searching for these objects would just be like trying to deal with a big angry predator by sticking your head in the ground and hoping it goes away.
Somebody cut NASA's budget! That'll stop anything that gets too close.
Certainly it's plausible that the accumulated mass of the these objects is of such huge proportion that (depending on composition) their raw materials would make them valuable enough to warrant actually collecting, no? To say nothing of the possible safety concerns of just leaving them there.
Try to make yourself useful and see if you can score an interview with Amy Mainzer, one of the people running this project. She's a brainy babe.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I think the next question is to ask ourselves how we are going to deal with these near-Earth asteroids. We should be ready for a rare but possible asteroid crash so that we don't have a second oil-spill-like incident.
DOOOOOMED!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The question is, would they tell us -- the general public -- if any of them were a real threat?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
First the mercury in energy efficient light bulbs... now space invaders... omg... i am going to church and kill myself and my children and my neighbours children and then i kill you... I WONT WANt TO SEE YOU DIE IN STONY SPACE INVADOR IMPACTS ON THIS PLANET!!!! \D:/
Or, I'm a grad student of the PI, anyway. Something they didn't note in the article is that sometime today the satellite successfully imaged 100% of the sky, after ~6 months of successful operation. The cryogen is currently expected to last until the first week of Nov or so, so we should be able to get half the sky double covered. In principal, we could do the full sky twice with the shorter wavelength channels, but there isn't funding for a warm mission as of right now.
Sadly, the asteroid finding channel needs the cryogen.
Check out the WISE website, though. This mission is almost certain to produce images that will be used by Google and Microsoft in the future. It's also producing a catalog of interesting objects for followup by the James Web Space Telescope.
Maybe if we want to get a probe out that way it could hitch a ride - and keep an eye on its dangerous companion as well.
While we're at it, Ceres is a nice asteroid to visit. It will be in a good spot in four years. It's likely completely covered with ice, could have liquid water, and has a nice low escape velocity - especially when you consider the rotational boost at the equator. Why, it's got a lot of the stuff you would be looking for in a fuel depot in the asteroid belt as a gateway to the stars. If Obama wants to visit Asteroids, let me recommend the biggest one.
I think if I was writing sci-fi I'd put habitation rings on the poles of Ceres and then accelerate them until they had a comfortable .5G or so on the perimeter. Probably counter-rotate the rings and tunnel through the planetoid from axis to axis. Nuclear power of course. Access through the Axis where it's close to 0G. An AI controlled water-based auto gyro-balancing mechanism can correct for people and stuff moving about on the wheels and hosing up the gyro. Asteroid mining ships wouldn't dock, they're too big. They'd get their water and provisions by scheduling an intercept vector. Launching would be a matter of pumping water to the right spot on the equator, embedding potables and manufactured goods and trackers and letting it freeze and then letting it out on a tether until it had even more rotational velocity and letting it go at the right moment. On Ceres the space elevator idea works well. Maybe snow-coat the package for impact absorption and target an asteroid close to the miner far off in the belt. Trade for fissionables and high grade ore - just launch the package into a Ceres intercept vector tagged with an invoice number and minimal course-correction waldos for close approach control.
Asteroid miners could visit on shuttles though - land on the equator, hop a local shuttle and enter through the Axis, or better yet - an elevator to the Core habitat with tunnels to the poles. Maybe I'd spin the core habitat too, and land the elevator just off it. With a surface gravity of 0.02G, the core pressure can't be too high for a habitat that's well armored by the mass of the planetoid. The equator gives a nice rotational vector for liftoff, reducing escape delta-v by almost 1/4. It's a great spot for a spaceport and colony - except for the long winters of course. Probably some cultural differences between Ringers and Grounders on Ceres to build a story around, lots of caves to explore to work in an ET angle. With 2.6 million square kilometers of surface area maybe some real-estate issues. A few billion years ago it was quite a lot warmer out this far, as the Sun was much brighter, so the alien relics can represent species more like us. Lots of ice to take cores of and find evidence of panspermia for the stories.
While we're at it, let's have asteroid miners drop laser reflectors and/or radar transponders on the largest asteroids they visit - that just happen to illuminate much of the belt in a way that facilitates object tracking.
Ceres is too rock-active for an interstellar spaceport and starship shipwright. For that you need a low-G environment near a planet that's swept its orbit so I would put that on Phobos probably.
There are lots of rocks out there. Impacts have to be fairly frequent too for added drama. It's likely by now the dust-to-pea sized stuff is well collected by now into larger asteroids so it's just the Walnut-to-city sized stuff to worry about. I wonder if anybody's calculated asteroid intercepts for Ceres yet. Ceres has had a long time to intercept the easy targets, just as Earth has, but there are a lot more rocks in that neighborhood than ours.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Preparation H usually gets rid of my Assteroids. Why does NASA have such a problem with them?
If they do detect an asteroid on a collision course with earth, I hope they take it more seriously than they took millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. They'll probably just pass legislation banning asteroids from hitting the earth, then debate for years about who's responsibility it is to stop it.
Suck it, Nullsoft installer
Holy crap, we managed not to notice all those goddamn giant asteroids that are heading for us right now! How did THAT one happen?
Oh, and by the way, high fructose corn syrup is actually a cleverly disguised contraceptive.
Whoops.
Humans are weird.
If there were a real Bruckheimer moment, and we were suddenly faced with an extinction level asteroid impact with little time to avert it, we would surely muster as much of our resources as we could to try to avoid certain doom, even if it cost hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.
However, if that asteroid were 15 or 20 years away?
The bickering would continue right up until impact. A small but highly funded group of "astronomers" would assure us that the asteroid would miss the earth entirely.
And another group of "astronomers" would insist that there was no asteroid at all.
We're hard wired like Holtzman shields: the sudden, quick attack raises our defenses, while we the slow attack boils us like frogs.
I maintain hope that we'll avoid a catastrophe that causes us to have to muster our efforts, at least until we progress beyond having to ask how it will impact this quarter's profits.
They have probably existed for millions of years — what is new is that they are newly known to mankind.
OK: a few might be new as a result of recent collisions, but most are old.
</pedant>
Well that was an intreguing piece of writing :)
Ceres does appear to be an interesting place indeed. I guess that's why we've got the Dawn spacecraft on the way there. 5 more years and we'll know a lot more about the place than before. If 5 years sound too far away, it'll also be studing Vesta, another interesting large asteroid belt object, next year.
Nice ideas. Too bad with our current technology we would be limited to landing a couple of nearly empty fuel tanks and a box of duct tape.
But go for it...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe it's just me, but this song seems to sing around the same time each year. I'm not in denial, but is somebody's grant money running out??
Grammar Nazis: stuff asteroids, apostrophes are the real threat.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think you have a good point there. In the old BG world people used funny acronyms for their their projects. Today, in the AG era, it's better to find unique names.
For instance, I work with digital signal processing where there are projects named "MUSIC", for "MUltiple SIgnal Classifier", and ESPRIT, for "Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques". Googling for those names alone is useless, you have to add "algorithm" for your search to return anything significant.
So, you may say, no big deal, just add the word "algorithm" to your searches. Well, maybe, but not quite. There are many other "music algorithms" out there and that search will return lots of extraneous material, but if you keep adding words to further refine your search you will start filtering out pages that actually interest you.
Because of that, when starting any new project I always google the names to make sure they are unique.
There's really no "hitching a ride" possible - to hitch without destroying (impacting) the spacecraft, both it and the asteroid need to travel at almost the same orbit already.
Furthermore, Ceres is not an asteroid...
Generally, don't go too overboard with SciFi fun; "impact absorption" won't really work at typical approach velocities between different orbits; that (and large scale mining too, perhaps) would probably just give a "Solar Kessler Syndrome" in the long run. There's lots and lots of energy, at big densities, needed to haul massive amounts of stuff in timescales acceptable to typical human - problem is, if you have easy access to such sources of energy, you can have pretty much everything you need locally, in any place (the bigger the better, easier to have other branches of mature industrial base nearby)
And actually, the Sun is "warming up" over time; anyway, species like us certainly wouldn't appear in such environment.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Let's burn down the observatory so this kind of thing will never happen again.
872835240
In order to get the virgins, you have to die fighting for Islam. If they offered the prize to anyone who simply followed the religion you'd find no-one is interested in dying now. If the US army just offered free food and board with no risk or responsibility what kind of recruits do you think it would get?
This is very similar to the older Nordic religions in this respect, only those who fell in battle were taken to Valhalla.
On further consideration, who would want to get stuck with 72 women who don't know what they are doing for all eternity? I'd rather have 36 Thai bar girls then 72 virgins.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
He is in low earth orbit.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
from a very interesting explanation by mister Brian Cox is that just mapping what's out there is not enough by far. We get saved from a lot of deepspace attacks (we all know the giant bugs are responsible ofcourse) by our huge nephews Saturn and Jupiter, who sit quietly closer to the outskirts of our solar system, attracting a lot of 'space debris' into the rings, or into orbit. BUT, they are also responsible for changing the trajectory of objects that happen to be fast and/or massive enough to escape their gravitational pull. I'm no supercomputer, and i dont think we have enough observatories to even try and calculate probability on risks like that but it does seem very possible that one of those pre-pre-pre-historic spacboulders could just get launched towards our blue planet. If it's big enough to survive the friction fight with our atmosphere, it could be big enough to cause some major damage. Big, what is big? Well if our earth fits into the red spot on Jupiter, which is (supposedly just a storm) then i suppose something REALLY big could get into the slingshot and if our cousin feels nasty, we might end up with more than just broken glass ...
But, ofcourse, i'm sure the superpowers of lady Gaga and Megamindy will save us.
Only thing i don't understand is why a lot of people think my kind of escapism is worse than theirs (but that has nothing to do with this ... or does it :p
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)