Let's fuel 2012 doomsday scenarios! How to prevent humanity from a mad asteroid strike.

For a change, let us contemplate about the need of 2012 doomsday defense. No irony intended here, of course.

Article:

To Deflect Killer Asteroids, Humanity Must Work Together

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 04 October 2011


An artist's illustration of a large asteroid headed for Earth. CREDIT: ESA

PASADENA, Calif. — The biggest obstacle in deflecting a killer asteroid away from Earth may be humanity's inability to get along.

We already have the technological know-how to prevent dangerous space rocks from barreling into our planet, provided we detect them in time. But this vital job would require a great deal of international cooperation, experts say, and history has shown that working together is not our species' strong suit.
"Somebody's got to make the decision to actually mount the deflection, and do it," said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman of the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to predicting and preventing catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth.

"That is not technical, but it's the toughest problem of all," Schweickart said here at the California Institute of Technology on Sept. 28, during a panel discussion called "Moving an Asteroid." [Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space]

VIDEO: Asteroid Bound - Animated Look at NASA's New Mission


Not if, but when
Our planet has always been pummeled by space rocks. A 6-mile (10-kilometer) asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, for example, wiping out the dinosaurs.

A potentially civilization-ending asteroid will bear down on Earth at some point, panelists stressed. It's a question of when, not if — and it could happen uncomfortably soon, they said.
Over the eons, asteroids big enough to cause serious damage today (not necessarily the extinction of our species, but disruptions to the global economy and civilizations around the world) have struck Earth every 200 to 300 years, Schweickart said. [5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids]

While the dinosaurs were helpless victims of this death from the sky, 21st-century humans don't have to be.
"What's cool is, we can do something about it," said panelist Bill Nye, executive director of the Planetary Society and former host of the science-themed TV show "Bill Nye the Science Guy."


An artist's impression of a giant space rock slamming into Earth 65 million years ago near what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. A consortium of scientists now says this was indeed what caused the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. CREDIT: NASA/Donald E. Davis

Giving asteroids a push
Humanity has the technical skills to move asteroids in several different ways, panelists said. We can hurl a large body into them, for example, changing their orbit with one dramatic impact.

NASA did just that in 2005, sending a small probe careening into the comet Tempel 1 to determine the icy wanderer's composition. The goal in that case was science rather than planetary defense, but the key is that humanity knows how to do it with today's technology.

Asteroid deflection could also work in more subtle ways.
Scientists could sidle an unmanned spacecraft up next to a potentially dangerous asteroid, then let the duo cruise through space together for months or years. Over time, the probe's modest gravity would tug the asteroid into a different, more benign orbit, Schweickart said.
This so-called "gravity tractor" technique would allow for precise deflection, making it perhaps the most attractive option, provided we have enough lead time.

Scientists know how to do this, too. Various robotic missions have met up with asteroids over the years, with some even landing on or touching the space rocks. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft even plucked some pieces off one in 2005, then sent the samples back to Earth for analysis.

If we didn't have very much warning time, and if the threatening space rock was too big to just knock around with an impactor, we could try to blast it apart with a nuclear missile. But this option should only be employed as a last resort, as it may end up doing more harm than good, panelists said.
"Momentum is conserved," Nye said. "If you blow it up, then the whole giant spray of rocks is coming at the Earth instead of one."


A concept spacecraft could use gravity to tow asteroids away from a collision course with earth. CREDIT: Dan Durda - FIAAA / B612 Foundation

Global cooperation needed
A potential asteroid strike would represent a global problem that the world would most likely have to tackle together, Schweickart said.
Cost is one issue that would bring nations together, though likely not the main one. A deflection mission might cost $500 million to $1 billion, Schweickart estimated. So it wouldn't exactly break the bank of the United States or another world power, but fairness would still seem to dictate that the costs be shared.

But many countries would want to be involved to make sure their own voices were being heard, and their own interests were being protected.
Say, for example, that an asteroid appeared to be headed for impact in the north Atlantic Ocean. Russia or China might push for a plan to nudge the asteroid to the west, away from them. The goal, of course, would still be to divert the asteroid away from Earth entirely — but Asia might be spared if the mission moved the asteroid a little, but not enough.

Conversely, the United States and Canada might want to move the asteroid in the other direction. [Natural Disasters: Top 10 U.S. Threats]
"That's why this geopolitical issue is very, very sticky," Schweickart said. "We've got to have agreement between nations."

Starting early
Such agreement might be tough to come by, especially since an effective deflection mission would have to be initiated early to have the best chance of success. We'd need lots of lead time, for example, to launch a gravity tractor spacecraft and give it time to tug on the asteroid.

In fact, we'd have to launch the mission before we were absolutely sure that the space rock in question was actually going to strike Earth, according to Schweickart.
"If you wait until you know, it's too late to act," he said.

Schweickart is pushing hard to raise awareness of the asteroid threat, and to convince people of the need to plan accordingly. He's afraid that the world will have a hard time pulling the trigger on a potentially civilization-saving mission.

"The likelihood is, we're going to end up with a big international debate until the day it hits," Schweickart said. "That's the most likely scenario."

Source:  Space.com

Vesta spins your head while rotating!

"In this movie, strung together from a series of images provided by the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft, we see a full rotation of Vesta, which occurs over the course of roughly five hours." - Source.

Vesta Full Rotation Movie

Link & HD video: YouTube

Look, we have a chaser! Trojan asteroid sharing Earth's orbit

NASA's WISE mission (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) made an astonishing discovery: The Earth has an asteroid following its orbit!

Article:

NASA's WISE Mission Finds First Trojan Asteroid Sharing Earth's Orbit

PASADENA, Calif. - 27-7-11
Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.


This artist's concept illustrates the first known Earth Trojan asteroid, discovered by WISE. The asteroid is gray and its extreme orbit is shown in green. Image credit: Paul Wiegert, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Source, full screen & caption: NASA

Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view.

"These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. "But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface."

The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.


Asteroid 2010 TK7 is circled in green, in this single frame taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA. Source, full screen & caption: NASA

The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers). An animation showing the orbit is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=103550791.

"It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this asteroid around."

A handful of other asteroids also have orbits similar to Earth. Such objects could make excellent candidates for future robotic or human exploration. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is not a good target because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require large amounts of fuel to reach it.

"This observation illustrates why NASA's NEO Observation program funded the mission enhancement to process data collected by WISE," said Lindley Johnson, NEOWISE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We believed there was great potential to find objects in near-Earth space that had not been seen before."

NEOWISE data on orbits from the hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets it observed are available through the NASA-funded International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The mission was selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah.

The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more WISE information visit: nasa.gov/wise.


Source: nasa.gov

Houston, we have feedback from 4 Vesta!

The asteroid mission DAWN is now delivering closeup images of the asteroid 4 Vesta.


Source: NASA / Wiki - Full resolution (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on July 17, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 9,500 miles (15,000 kilometers) away from the protoplanet Vesta. Each pixel in the image corresponds to roughly 0.88 miles (1.4 kilometers). Vesta has a mean diameter of 529 km.

Article by space.com:

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has beamed home the first close-up photo of the huge asteroid Vesta, just days after entering orbit around the distant space rock.
The new photo, which Dawn snapped for navigation purposes on Sunday (July 17), shows Vesta in greater detail than ever before, researchers said. Astronomers have been observing the gigantic space rock for 200 years, first with ground telescopes and later orbiting observatories, but have never been able to see it so clearly, they added.

"We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell, of UCLA, in a statement. [Photos: See the first close-up photos of Vesta]
"This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons," Russell added.


This composite image shows the comparative sizes of eight asteroids. Until now, Lutetia, with a diameter of 81 miles (130 kilometers), was the largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft, which occurred during a flyby. Vesta, which is also considered a protoplanet because it's a large body that almost became a planet, dwarfs all other small bodies in this image, with diameter of approximately 330 miles (530 km). CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA/ESA


Read more: NASA Spacecraft Snaps First Close-Up Photo of Huge Asteroid Vesta

How a manned asteroid mission could look like

Let's have a look at this imaginative NASA animation, that illustrates a possible future mission to an asteroid - with astronauts:

Near-Earth Asteroid - Mission Animation

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhaqEVd29io

Source & Date: 15th July 2011, http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/home/index.html

"This artist's concept animation depicts a mission to a near-Earth asteroid. In this animation, astronauts in the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV) dock with an asteroid, perform a spacewalk, and return to the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) for the journey back to Earth."

From Dusk till DAWN: Going to Vesta, the big asteroid

NASA's Dawn Asteroid Mission now reaches the level of recognizable visual results and interesting explorations.

We now get to see more of the 2nd largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt:

Source: NASA (with article)

Image description by behindtheblack.com:
Another image of Vesta from Dawn has been released. This image was taken on July 9 from a distance of 26,000 miles away. It is definitely an improvement over the previous image, with more small details becoming visible. However, I once again wonder about the softness of the image. Look at the limb of the planet. It is soft against the black sky. This is not what one would expect from perfectly focused camera. Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta next week.

An info graphic on the DAWN mission for exploring Vesta: How NASA's Dawn Asteroid Mission works (space.com)