Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth (cnn.com)

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Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth (cnn.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday June 16, 2016 @07:00PM from the quasi-moon dept.

Frosty Piss writes from a report via CNN: A small asteroid has been found circling Earth. Scientists say it looks like the asteroid, named 2016 HO3, has been out there for about 50 years. Calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. Scientists think the asteroid is between 120 and 300 feet (37 to 91 meters) in diameter, and NASA says it never gets closer than 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) from Earth. It was found on April 27, 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years? Probably the same way we've missed all the flying saucers!

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To put it into perspective by shockwaverider · 2016-06-16 19:06 · Score: 5, Informative

It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?

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1. Re:To put it into perspective by umafuckit · 2016-06-16 19:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
  Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
  There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.
  
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2. Re:To put it into perspective by Anonymous Coward · 2016-06-16 19:29 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Never is such a long time.
3. Re:To put it into perspective by Anonymous Coward · 2016-06-16 21:15 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  You have a limited imagination. Soon or later humans are going to have to leave this planet or face extinction. At some point moon bases will exist, land there will have value as the uber rich make their claims, resources will be needed. Metals and minerals are surrounding us, those on Earth are being wasted and will become rarer. Fast forward a million years... You can do the rest.
  Perhaps you're mistaking this site for reddit or the daily mail, where attention spans are measured in atto-seconds, and the future doesn't exist beyond the next celebrity tit/ass selfie.
4. Re:To put it into perspective by Kokuyo · 2016-06-16 21:17 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Jeez, what a surefire way to be wrong you've chosen. Others already commented on the infinite time frame you've chosen but I'd like to add that "cost effective" is pretty relative.
  There just needs to be a shortage of material found on an asteroid that is either life threatening or lowers our quality of life enough for people to decide they're going to try it.
  And why should this never be cost effective? Robotic mining equipment needs to be deployed once. And without much gravity to speak off, all you need to do is launch the mined material in the direction of a desert every few days.
  Can't be that hard to accomplish.
5. Re:To put it into perspective by taiwanjohn · 2016-06-16 21:35 · Score: 2
  
  It's a good candidate for an 'asteroid redirect' mission in any case, but the mining potential depends on what it's made of. Chances are it made of something that would be useful up there. I would bet that Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are interested in this rock. It would give them a chance to prove out the basic technology they'll need in the long term, and which we'll all need for planetary protection.
  It's already in a pretty handy orbit, but I'd like to see them send a 'gravity tug' to coax this asteroid into a lower orbit, and try to park it at L2.
  
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6. Re:To put it into perspective by michelcolman · 2016-06-16 22:23 · Score: 2
  
  I assume you've never played Kerbal Space Program.
  Why would you want to get into a solar orbit? Your goal is to get close to the asteroid with zero relative velocity, in other words you need to get into exactly the same orbit around the earth. I fail to see how exiting the earth's gravity well and then coming back again would somehow make that easier to achieve.
  The easiest way to get there is probably by first getting into low earth orbit, then accelerating into a slingshot maneuver around the moon that raises your apogee to touch the asteroid's orbit, preferably near its apogee, all timed so you meet the asteroid there. It will be approaching you from behind, so you need to accelerate on your orbit around the earth, raising your perigee (and adjusting inclination) until your orbit matches that of the asteroid. I suppose you can call that "braking" in the asteroid's reference frame, I'll give you that, but it's really more like merging onto a highway and accelerating to keep up with traffic. Most of your energy will be spent getting there: it's so far away from the earth that orbital velocities are very low, so you won't need much delta-v to match its speed. That last part will actually be a lot easier than getting to the moon.
  If you're really good, you can skip the low earth orbit and launch straight into a moon slingshot, but that will give you a really tiny and infrequent launch window. Probably not the best idea in practice.
7. Re:To put it into perspective by michelcolman · 2016-06-16 22:36 · Score: 2
  
  It's probably a little harder than that. First of all you don't just launch stuff in the direction of a desert, you launch them retrograde to the asteroid's orbit so it gets into an orbit with a perigee close to earth. Then you have to keep it from burning up in the atmosphere, which means you'll have to enclose it in some sort of vessel that can survive reentry (unless you send a really huge chunk and accept the fact that much of it will burn up in the atmosphere and you'll have to dig up the rest from the impact crater).
  O, and make sure you don't hit any satellites or space stations.
8. Re:To put it into perspective by jafiwam · 2016-06-16 22:56 · Score: 2
  
  Or, you could... you know... just build stuff IN ORBIT where raw materials cost 87 thousand times what it would cost on the surface.
  Moving and parking that thing would be a bitch, but it's value as raw materials to make things in space would be immense.
  Especially true if it's made of metals. You could do all kinds of things, make reaction mass for out of Earth orbit craft, make beams and struts to put together a station, use it for soil, counterweights, etc.
  If it's not metal, you could get gasses or possibly water or other materials from it.
  That's after it's been studied well of course.
  The thing came to us after all, it's ours. we can consume it if we want... all of these worlds are yours except for Europa. Attempt no landings there.
9. Re:To put it into perspective by rpresser · 2016-06-16 23:11 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  This asteroid is *not* in orbit around the earth. It is a quasisatellite, like Cruithne, in a true orbit around the sun ... but in such an orbit that its distance from Earth never exceeds 19 million miles.
  To reach a quasisatellite, you *will* need to leave true Earth orbit and obtain a solar orbit. Your transfer orbit will then intersect the quasisatellite's orbit, and when you get close, you will match orbits so you can land.
10. Re:To put it into perspective by rpresser · 2016-06-16 23:13 · Score: 2
  
  And incidentally, KSP cannot model quasisatellites, because the orbit is not just an ellipse -- it's an ellipse that shifts, due to gravitational effects from Earth and other bodies, after a given (large) number of orbits. KSP only uses true ellipses for planets and moons, and patched conics for ships and (maybe) asteroids. It doesn't use real 3-body mechanics at all.
11. Re:To put it into perspective by Grishnakh · 2016-06-17 03:19 · Score: 2
  
  Sorry, no. You don't need fuel (or much of it anyway) to deorbit anything.
  To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere. There's various ways you can handle that without your valuable ores (or better yet, fully processed ores) simply vaporizing: you can build some kind of aerodynamic structure so the thing aerobrakes on the way down, or you can surround it with a bunch of ablative shielding (like how regular space capsules return to earth), maybe using some kind of cheap material that's also mined up there. If it's just a big hunk of rock, and not humans, then you don't need to worry about g-forces or high temperatures on the way down, you just need a way to make the thing fall to earth 1) in a place where you can retrieve it and where it doesn't damage anything (and someone doesn't steal it after all your hard work), and 2) in a way that it doesn't vaporize or disintegrate. We've been dropping space capsules like the Apollo and Soyuz capsules back to Earth, with humans inside, for many decades now without much trouble. I'm sure dropping hunks of rock intact won't be that hard.
  The hard parts are getting robotic equipment built which actually does the job, launching it, capturing asteroids, processing them somehow to extract the valuable ores, and then packaging it to be sent back to Earth.
12. Re:To put it into perspective by MillionthMonkey · 2016-06-17 06:32 · Score: 2
  
  To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it.
  It takes more energy to deorbit something than to escape it entirely, because orbital velocity is already 1/sqrt(2) of escape velocity. Getting to the sun requires a velocity more than three times as high as it takes to get out of the solar system entirely, which basically means about 10X as much fuel. (The fuel itself is heavy, so it's higher than that.)
50 years, century... by flyingfsck · 2016-06-16 19:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

So is it 50 years for small values of a century, or is it a century for large values of 50 years?

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So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been by cerberusss · 2016-06-16 19:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?
We weren't looking for that particular object.
Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

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Re:So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has be by ledow · 2016-06-16 20:19 · Score: 2

Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.
"orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.
However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.
Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either. But people have this Star Trek definition that "orbit" means "just up there and close-by".
There are objects orbiting the Sun that only reappear once every few million years, whip past and then you don't see them again for another few million years. That's still an orbit.
Like Halley's Comet - an orbit doesn't mean it even spends more than 1% of its time actually near you. It could literally orbit at a radius of light year or a billion light years. That's still an orbit.
And with any telescope you can put in your back garden, you can just about get a decent image of most of the planets. That's about it. In terms of anything smaller, even with the largest of observatories and clever tricks, such objects are basically invisible and often only spotted by "Oh, look, there was a datapoint on this set of billions of other datapoints that looks periodic or related".
People misunderstand quite how far the planets are, how big they are, how fast they are moving, how fast we are spinning, and how tiny everything looks from here. Literally, at hundreds of times magnification, planets are only tiny dots in your retina and moving so fast that you can't follow them manually across the sky and need computers and motors to help do it. Yet their real size, speed and distance are inconceivable - in the "hundreds of thousands of Earths put together" ranges.
Re:So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has be by codeButcher · 2016-06-16 20:48 · Score: 2

Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.
Well, why can't they schedule the landing for nighttime when it doesn't shine?
(OK, old joke, I'll quit now.)

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You might refer to it as as asteroid... by Serif · 2016-06-16 21:10 · Score: 5, Funny

We prefer the term "Mother Ship"/
Re:So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has be by alexhs · 2016-06-16 22:01 · Score: 2

I would have up-moderated, but some of the computations seem off...
Sphere area is pi * r^2 (*).
So, for 80m diameter, radius is 40m, that would be pi * 1.6 * 10^3 m^2. Cross sectional area with a sphere differ, but for a 14 * 10^6 km radius sphere, curvature is small enough to ignore.
Sphere with a radius of 14 * 10^9 m has a surface area of pi * 1.96 * 10^20 m^2.
Solid angle formed by the asteroid is (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (14 * 10^9)^2 = (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) / (1.96 * 10^20) = pi * 8.2 * 10^-18 = 2.6 * 10^-17 sr
Number of such asteroids that could fit onto the sphere is (pi * 1.96 * 10^20) / (pi * 1.6 * 10^3) = 1.225 * 10^17 (that one was correct)
Compared to the land surface of the USA (9.15 * 10^6 km^2), that would be (9.15 * 10^12 m^2) / (1.225 * 10^17) = 7.47 * 10^-5 m^2 = 74.7 mm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 9.8 mm.
Compared to the surface of the earth (~510 * 10^6 km^2), that would be (510 * 10^12 m^2) / (1.225 * 10^17) = 416 * 10^-5 m^2 = 41.6 cm^2, or a disc with a diameter of 7.3cm.
I guess Muphry's law applies, will someone double-check ? :)
(*) When do we get enough Unicode for greek and math symbols ?

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Re:because ... by Anonymous Coward · 2016-06-16 22:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

And it's fucking tiny.
Let's put some numbers on this. The average grain of coarse sand is 2mm in diameter, so a grain of coarse sand a kilometre away occupies an arc of 115 millionths of a degree. A 37m rock 14 million km away occupies an arc 151 millionths of a degree, very much the same ballpark.
So spotting this thing would be like trying to see a cold, dark grain of sand from a kilometre away, at night. Good luck with that.
Re:So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has be by Big+Hairy+Ian · 2016-06-16 23:31 · Score: 2

Where were you the other day? I quoted Marvin and all I got was psychoanalyzed!

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3e-09 radians, 5e-19 stradians. in just 50 years?? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · 2016-06-16 23:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

Quick mental calculation shows that object is subtending 3e-09 radians at Earth. Need back of the envelop for solid angle. About 5e-19 stradians if it its a ball 300 feet across. Give or take a few orders of magnitude.
Now the question is not "how come we missed it for 50 years?". The question is "how come we found it in just 50 years! OMG our astronomers are awesome!".

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Re:because ... by INT_QRK · 2016-06-17 00:04 · Score: 2

“has been out there for about 50 yearshas been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century” so...which is it?
Re:because ... by alexhs · 2016-06-17 00:32 · Score: 2

I don't get the same results (*) :
Arc formed by a grain of coarse sand one kilometre away:
(2 mm / (2 * pi * 10^6 mm )) * (360 / (2 * pi)) = 180 * 10^-6 / pi^2 = 18 * 10^-6
Arc formed by an asteroid of 37m 14 million km away:
(37 m / (2 * pi * 14 * 10^9 m )) * (360 / (2 * pi)) = 238 * 10^-9 / pi^2 = 24 * 10^-9
So, that would be 750 times smaller that a grain of sand a kilometre away.
(*) But I've been wrong in the current discussion already, so don't believe me and double-check ;)

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Re:because ... by tehcyder · 2016-06-17 02:15 · Score: 3, Funny

And it's fucking tiny.
Let's put some numbers on this. The average grain of coarse sand is 2mm in diameter, so a grain of coarse sand a kilometre away occupies an arc of 115 millionths of a degree. A 37m rock 14 million km away occupies an arc 151 millionths of a degree, very much the same ballpark.
So spotting this thing would be like trying to see a cold, dark grain of sand from a kilometre away, at night. Good luck with that.
All you need is a good torch, sorry flashlight, and a telescope. Hardly rocket science.

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Fucking CNN by oh_my_080980980 · 2016-06-17 02:18 · Score: 5, Informative

Learn to fucking report. The asteroid orbits the Sun not the Earth. It's not a moon nor satellite. It's best described as a companion because the asteriod and earth follow SIMILAR ORBIT around the sun. Nothing more. Just read the JPL article: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n... Fuck off CNN.
Re:because ... by bondsbw · 2016-06-17 03:08 · Score: 2

At what point does it make less sense to say that the asteroid is orbiting the Earth, and more sense to say that both are orbiting the sun near each other with the same orbital period?

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Re:because ... by cellocgw · 2016-06-17 04:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Because the algorithms governing orbital progression are very well known. You watch the thing for a while , fit its path to the function, and run time in reverse (JUST IN THE SIMULATION) to see where it came from.
Heck, it's been decades since amateur astronomers did this with Soviet satellites and discovered the launch sites before the CIA did.

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Re:because ... by geantvert · 2016-06-17 05:17 · Score: 2

In the famous Hubble deep field image shown at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the smallest galaxies are approximatively at 10 billion = 1E10 light years. Assuming that they have a typical size of 100000=1e5 light years (as our own galaxy) that gives us the ratio 1e5/1e10 = 1e-5
The asteroid is 100m = 1e2 meters wide at a distance of 14 millions km = 14 billions meters= 14e9 meters which give a ratio of 1e2 / 14e9 = 7.14e-09
So on the Hubble deep field image, the asteroid would be about 1400 times smaller than the smallest galaxies.
Re:because ... by bughunter · 2016-06-17 06:00 · Score: 2

run time in reverse (JUST IN THE SIMULATION)
Thanks for that clarification. Wouldn't want to get a ticket for a causality violation or anything...

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