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."

Comments

Of course I want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather know it's my last chance to see people than not get that chance.

Also, first?

Re:Of course I want to know

[ushering05401]

So Cletus turns to his friend Clem and says:

"Clem, if there was an asteroid and it was going to absolutely pulverize the Earth; by which I mean it will smash the Earth to frickin smithereens; and you have got only thirty minutes left to your god blessed life what in the world would you do with yourself?"

Clem chews his chaw a minute, spits, and retorts: "Well Cletus, I suppose I'd fuck the living hell out of the first thing that moved. How 'bout you good friend?"

Cletus mulls the problem and, in solemn tone replies: "Well Clem, I'd prolly just stand perfectly still."

Re:A WISE old owl?

[grommit]

I don't recall ever using any WISE terminals. I have used terminals made by WYSE though. I'm curious why the potato chip company would want to search for asteroids though. Please enlighten me?

This isn't scary at all

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:This isn't scary at all

[tpstigers]

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.

Exactly. Call Bruce Willis.

Re:This isn't scary at all

[mysidia]

However, in some cases, sticking your entire body in the hole might help, if the hole is deep enough, and the predator is sufficiently large and unable to reach into the hole.

Re:This isn't scary at all

[peragrin]

Nope according to quantum theory they didn't exist before because we couldn't measure them. Or was that intelligent design? I always get the two confused. Both require the belief that in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded.

Re:This isn't scary at all

[shaitand]

Perhaps we could save precious strong barrier material by shaping it into closely spaced bars and put a lock on the over-surface hole.

We could even give the predator (who we will refer to by the arbitrary term "the man") the key and hope it one day lets us out if we (hereafter referred to as citizens) please it. We might call this "good behavior."

Nah... never catch on.

Re:This isn't scary at all

[Urkki]

Nope according to quantum theory they didn't exist before because we couldn't measure them. Or was that intelligent design? I always get the two confused. Both require the belief that in the beginning there was nothing and then it exploded.

Ah, but in quantum mechanics, once we observe something ("cause the the wave function to collapse into a determined state", to be technical), we retroactively determine it's existence at least as far back from the observation as uncertainty principle allows us to theoretically calculate.

So even if an asteroid doesn't exist now, if we observe it as a fiery ball hurtling across the sky and getting rapidly bigger, it's existence will get retroactively established back through the history of the universe.

The only protection is to observe that an asteroid is not in a certain location, and thus snuff out the possibility of one popping up there magically just to annoy (and kill) us. Once we have observed all possible locations where a rogue asteroid could be, we can be sure none will pop out of nothingness.

Or alternatively, if you think magically appearing asteroids are not a plausible idea, you can think the asteroid was there all the time, but that's boring... ;-)

Hey Slashdot!

[oldhack]

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.

Re:Hey Slashdot!

[ColdWetDog]

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.

What? An interview? Come on now, this is Slashdot - the vast majority of users don't even read the friggin' summary. Much less the article. Much less actually going OUTSIDE and talking to ANOTHER PERSON of the OPPOSITE SEX.

My God man, think about what you're saying.

Re:Hey Slashdot!

[shaitand]

Perhaps we could just forward on the most highly moderated questions in Slashdot tradition. For instance, I believe an AC above posed an interesting query regarding the size of her hooters...

Re:Hey Slashdot!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Totally agree. Here's a sample.

The next step

[Leo_07]

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.

Re:The next step

[MichaelSmith]

For the vast majority of impacts it will be enough to evacuate the impact site. For this there are two basic problems:

1. Exactly where and when will the impact occur? To answer this we need really accurate tracking. Transponders on the impactor would help a lot.
2. How do we safely evacuate the target area? What do we do if the target is Calcutta? Move the population to Afghanistan? I bet that will go down well. This is a political problem which can only partly address right now. Improvements are needed.

Re:The next step

[Nyeerrmm]

Its pretty easy to move something bigger, given enough time. Potential mitigation of Apophis, among other asteroids, has been extensively studied. Note that its approximately 270 meters and 2.7e10 kg, enough to cause significant regional destruction, wiping out a continent.

As an example case study that I worked on, a 500 kg spacecraft hovering a few hundred meters away from an asteroid for a year is enough to move it 10s of Earth radii. Note that you'd need similar behavior to get a good track. The key is to make the move early. This particular plan was intended to eliminate the threat of a 2036 impact, which is well known to correspond with a 600-meter wide 'keyhole' during the 2029 approach. By moving the asteroid a few meters forward or backwards in 2022, the threat is mitigated -- you move it by kilometers and in 2029, and 10s of Earth radii in 2036.

Closed orbits over many revolutions are incredibly sensitive to very small changes, and close flybys, which are likely for a potential threat, increase the sensitivity by orders of magnitude. The key ingredients are time, tracking, and high fidelity trajectory models.

Re:Great, how long till we can strip mine them?

[arkane1234]

Once we figure out a way to stop a massive hunk of matter hurdling through space, then we can get our robotic strip mining machines out to latch on and tear it apart.
Probably in another year or two.

Re:A WISE old owl?

[ColaMan]

I'm curious why the potato chip company would want to search for asteroids though.

A mass extinction event would seriously jeopardise their potato chip business. It's Business 101 people - always attempt to identify and classify any risks to your business. Jeez.

We're doomed

[countertrolling]

DOOOOOMED!

The question is...

[chill]

The question is, would they tell us -- the general public -- if any of them were a real threat?

Re:The question is...

[QuantumG]

They'd tell you numbers which you wouldn't understand. Then the pundits would turn those numbers into something they can scare you with, probably overblowing the threat while they do so, and Concerned Citizens would go to their Congressmen demanding answers. NASA would provide those answers.. in a completely unintelligible way, and someone would interpret those answers as dismissing the threat. Then there'd be a big argument over whether it's a threat or isn't it. Eventually one of the egg heads with a wife will get a lecture about talking like a normal person once in a while and a press statement would be released saying exactly how likely and excessive the threat is (after it went through a few committees to ensure it was easy enough to understand, and defend). By this time the media will be completely bored with the story and the press release will be ignored by everyone, except for the next committee which is tasked with finding a solution. Having found the solution the funding will not be forthcoming as the whole thing has already been written off as a hoax. A few years of fighting for funding and being rebuffed later, the media will pick up on the story again.. perhaps after the threat has been renamed. This time a-solution-the-authorities-have-been-ignoring will be available and someone-better-lose-his-job-over-this. Of course, the solution that came out of that committee was for a situation that hasn't been true for years now, so we need a new committee.. this time with the President's appointment. They'll listen to a dozen different proposals, some of which have already been discarded as worthless, and choose the one that has the best political chance of being enacted quickly. Eventually it'll get funding but the project will stall after 2 years of development, but thankfully some of the runner up concepts also got a trickle of funding. There will be a political fight to fund the more successful project over the stalled project, but that will fail, instead more money will be directed towards the hopeless project, until finally the egos on both sides subside and come up with some "compromise" solution that will half work, averting the complete extinction of human kind but still killing a few million people in a far-off-land. Everyone will swear that next-time-we'll-be-ready but not actually do anything to ensure that's the case.. a few years later researchers will complain that their funding for early warning systems is being cut, and the general public will not care because, hey, it didn't turn out to be as big a deal as they said it was going to be anyway.

Re:The question is...

[TapeCutter]

"The question is, would they tell us -- the general public -- if any of them were a real threat?"

Of course they would, but then the general public will also be told by..

Corporate lobbyists: Asteroids don't exist and these hacked emails prove it.
Greenpeace: Minning companies altered it's orbit so as to get their hands on the minerals.
Politicians: Dear voter, I think the same way about this issue as you do, whatever that may be.
BP: For $2 billion we can put a hat on it.
Obama: That's a mighty fine hat.
Bush: Heck of a job there BP.
Christians: Pack your bags, here comes the rapture.
Muslims: Pack your bags, here come the virgins.
Jews: I can see the promised land in my telescope.
Myans: We told you so.
New age mystics: There's a herbal remedy available for ass-ter-oids.

I'm a Member of the WISE Team

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Some NEOs also head out to Mars and the Asteroids

[symbolset]

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.

If...

[frozentier]

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.

They'll teach the controversy.

[dameron]

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.

Re:They'll teach the controversy.

[dylan_-]

How about this? Astronomers agree with the ruling class that a gigantic hoax would have "positive" effects on society.

Unbelievably, there are actually people who believe that this could actually happen! Of course, they're the kind of person who're either too lazy or too stupid to just learn a bit of astronomy and check for themselves, yet are still convinced that they know better than anyone who's actually made the effort. But then, there's no shortage of those.

Officer Crabtree

[Hognoxious]

Greenpeace: Minning companies altered it's orbit so as to get their hands on the minerals.

Grammar Nazis: stuff asteroids, apostrophes are the real threat.

Re:The asteroids are not ''new''

[sznupi]

Hush, they're just 6k years old.

Ob. Simpsons

[johno.ie]

Let's burn down the observatory so this kind of thing will never happen again.

Re:A WISE old owl?

[Yvan256]

Wise guy, eh?

Re:Great, how long till we can strip mine them?

[Yvan256]

Could also be useful in case somebody wants to build a bypass near us.