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Asteroid Passes Closer To Earth Than the Moon on Nov 8
First time accepted submitter TheNextCorner writes "NASA scientists will be tracking asteroid 2005 YU55 with antennas of the agency's Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Calif., as the space rock safely flies past Earth slightly closer than the moon's orbit on Nov. 8. Scientists are treating the flyby of the 1,300-foot-wide (400-meter) asteroid as a science target of opportunity – allowing instruments on 'spacecraft Earth' to scan it during the close pass. "
I'm amazed I haven't seen doomsday theories regarding this yet.
50,000 characters used to live here.
WERE DOOMED
We were doomed? So we're safe now?
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The difference in velocity between the asteroid and earth could be enormous. Just because it's coming close doesn't mean it's practical to land on it or orbit it. However we could always smash something into it then analyze the ejecta from earth.
Better known as 318230.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/2005_YU55_approach_movie.gif
To test attaching a rocket to it to send it on another course. It seems like a low cost way to test some of the anti-asteroid plans.
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"However we could always smash something into it then analyze the ejecta from earth."
That's crazy. We would never do something like that.
I love my sig.
The issue here is the relative speed of the asteroid. It is very likely that it is moving from much further out in the Solar System, thus it will be moving a bit faster than the Earth/Moon.
None the less, this distance to the Earth will be plenty to significantly change the orbital characteristics of this asteroid as it goes around the Sun (due to the gravity of the Earth).
In terms of landing on an asteroid like this, there have been several proposals made to do just that, and there are several other candidate asteroids that will be passing just as close if not even closer over the next decade or so. Some of those missions even have been suggested to be manned missions to the asteroid, which could get quite interesting. One of the mission profiles is to head out to meet the asteroid about a month before it comes close to the Earth, and then do a "sample return" (manned or unmanned) using the Earth's atmosphere as an aerobrake. Obviously you need a much beefier heat shield than for ordinary LEO reentry, but it isn't as bad as it would seem and certainly is the realm of current aeronautical technology to accomplish. The SpaceX Dragon could easily cope with that kind of entry profile, to give an example.
The issue with this particular one is simply timing and getting something sent up before it passes. This particular asteroid is unlikely to get that kind of treatment mainly because it is a much more recent discovery (discovered in 2005 based on its designation), and it hasn't even received an asteroid number yet. This one might actually get a name... something that is missing for most new asteroid discoveries.
NO! YOUR DOOMED
The thing is a little bigger than an aircraft carrier (the diameter is about the same as a carrier's length), so I don't know how useful it'd be for a space station, but it would be very interesting to know what its composition is; if it's useful minerals, then it could be extremely valuable. It's really rather pathetic that we haven't had enough foresight to invest in building up our space program so that we have the capability of trapping a small asteroid like this that's so convenient, so that we can mine it for resources. Unlike leveling mountains and digging giant pit mines, you'll never have any environmentalists complaining about off-planet asteroid mining, and the ores in asteroids have potentially much higher yield than those found in the earth's crust.
My, what an eccentric asteroid.
First, you wouldn't try to capture it as it's whizzing by the Earth with a giant delta-V, you'd strap a rocket to it (or something) and slowly change its trajectory so that it eventually became "parked" in a location convenient to the earth, perhaps in a Lagrangian point, with zero delta-V. This would obviously take some time; one of those new ion engines, working over the course of a few years, might do the trick; it wouldn't be an overnight operation.
Secondly, no, building the equipment would be cheap if you already had manufacturing facilities in space (or someplace low-gravity, like the moon), and already had designs in place and had already built such equipment before. Getting to that point is obviously expensive, but obviously you wouldn't build a whole space program to capture one asteroid and mine it, and then quit. (Well, if you're America, you might....) You'd do this with lots of asteroids, and pretty soon you've easily repaid your investment. It's like building a factory: you don't spend $3 billion to make a semiconductor fab and then just build one chip, you build many millions of them, and eventually pay back your investment.
According to TFA, the asteroid is mostly black and "aircraft carrier sized". The first thing that flashed into my mind was that it would be very interesting if radar images during the flyby revealed it was in fact a very, Very VERY old spacecraft.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What's so hard to understand? Some may be strong, some barely noticeable, but each is preparing your body for the actual onset of labor.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's a shame that NASA posts a lame size comparison to a warship, instead of educating people with the much larger scale of this event. To wit:
1) Earth is a basketball
2) Luna is a baseball, orbiting about 30 feet (9m) away from the basketball
3) Asteroid 2005YU55 is a red blood cell (about 1/10 the diameter of a human hair), passing about 25 feet away from the basketball
The truly amazing thing is that we can see surface details on that red blood cell from 25 feet away.
There have been several known instances of rocks of non-trivial size passing closer to the earth than the geostationary sats, and in some cases inside the GPS sat constellation.
This one missed us by 1 Earth radius.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=dist&sdir=ASC&tlim=past&dmax=5LD&max_rows=500&action=Display+Table&show=1
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news142.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_asteroids#Asteroids
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Speaking of doomed, wasn't someone predicting the end of the world on October 25th?
And that "someone" has dissapeared. At the same time, the rapture has been postponed to December 24th 2012.
Catching it as it approaches as you recommend would still be fairly difficult, because in changing the speed to park it in orbit, you will have to change it's speed enough that it probably won't end up near earth.
If it's slower than earth, you would have to send the tug out, and start picking up speed so earth will catch up to it. If it's faster than us, you will have to slow it down as you describe, but our current engines aren't strong enough to do this in one pass. The ion engine Grishnakh mentions is much more efficient than old chemical rockets, but I think it would take a month to move a probe (or the tug) out to moon orbit. Slowing down an asteroid with ion engines would take years as Grishnakh said.
Bah! There arent any women on slashdot so weve no need of such arcane knowledge! Begone with you! Well do just fine without knowing how those contraction things are supposed to work!
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