Near-Earth objects and close calls

https://twitter.com/x/status/1412567232832577544
Snip:
Did you know that NASA is going to send a spacecraft on a suicide mission in an attempt to change the trajectory of a massive space rock? The good news is that the space rock that NASA will be crashing this spacecraft into is not on a collision course with Earth. It is only a test. But why has NASA suddenly become so concerned with figuring out how to defend the Earth from giant asteroids? Could it be possible that there is something heading toward Earth in the future that they haven’t told us about yet?

According to NASA, there are more than 26,000 asteroids that pass near Earth, and more than 2,000 of them are classified as “potentially dangerous” asteroids.

Most of those “potentially dangerous” asteroids aren’t that large, but 158 of them do have a diameter of more than one kilometer.

If one of those monsters were to hit us, it would be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

Of course there are countless other space rocks that our scientists have not discovered yet, and those probably represent the greatest threat. Because if you don’t see a threat coming, you can’t get prepared for it in advance.

These days, NASA officials have become quite preoccupied by the threat that giant space rocks potentially pose, and we are being told that “scientists are at work on a plan to avoid the destruction of Earth by an errant asteroid”. The following comes from an article that was just published by the Boston Globe…

NASA and a cadre of the world’s leading engineers and space scientists are at work on a plan to avoid the destruction of Earth by an errant asteroid like the one 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs, created a cloud of dust so impenetrable that it blocked out the sun, and plunged the planet into a prolonged winter that sent half of all plant life into extinction.
Personally, I think that this is something that NASA should definitely be focusing on, because the threat is very real.

Most people don’t realize this, but our planet is actually being pelted by space debris on a constant basis at this point. In fact, NASA says that we are being hit by very small objects “every day”…

Every day, Earth is bombarded by tons of dust and sand-sized particles from the solar system. Meteoroids burn up as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere causing little or no damage. They are easy to spot, streaking across the night sky in brilliant, short-lived bursts of light. Of more concern are the asteroids that pass by Earth unnoticed; they are difficult to detect and track as observers depend on reflected sunlight to spot them.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the objects that we encounter are too small to do any damage.

But it is just a matter of time before a really big space rock comes along.

NASA officials like to give the impression that they have a really good idea of what is going on up there, but the truth is that our ability to detect large space rocks is still quite limited. In May, a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that came close to Earth was only discovered about a week before it arrived…

The reason why 2021 KT1 is news is that NASA estimates that it’s between 492 feet/150 meters and 1,082 feet/330 meters in diameter. It wasn’t observed until late in May 2021 just a week before its closest pass.
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www.space.com

China wants to launch asteroid-deflecting rockets to save Earth from Armageddon

The asteroid could be rammed by 23 of China's Long March 5 rockets
www.space.com www.space.com
By Ben Turner about 6 hours ago
The asteroid could be rammed by 23 of China's Long March 5 rockets
Chinese scientists are planning to fire more than 20 rockets into space to divert an asteroid impact that has a small chance of one day ending life on Earth.

Their target is an asteroid named Bennu, a 85.5-million-ton (77.5 million metric ton) space rock that is on track to swoop within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth's orbit between 2175 and 2199. Although Bennu's chances of striking Earth are slim — at just 1 in 2,700 — the asteroid is as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, meaning that any collision with the Earth would be cataclysmic.

The estimated kinetic energy of Bennu's impact with Earth is 1,200 megatons, which is roughly 80,000 times greater than the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison, the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs delivered about 100 million megatons of energy, Live Science previously reported.

Related: The 7 strangest asteroids: Weird space rocks in our solar system

Scientists at China's National Space Science Center calculated that 23 Long March 5 rockets, each weighing 992 tons (900 metric tons), pushing against the rock simultaneously would be necessary to divert the asteroid away from a fatal course by nearly 6,000 miles (9,000 km) — 1.4 times the Earth's radius. Their calculations are detailed in a new study published in the forthcoming Nov. 1 issue of the journal Icarus.

"Asteroid impacts pose a major threat to all life on Earth," Mingtao Li, space science engineer of the National Space Science Center in Beijing and lead author of the new study, wrote in the paper. "Deflecting an asteroid on an impact trajectory is critical to mitigating this threat."

The Chinese scientists' plan would sidestep the need to stop the asteroid by more direct, yet riskier, means — like the atomic bomb method popularized by Bruce Willis in the film "Armageddon." In reality, nuking the incoming space rock would break it into multiple smaller chunks that could still collide with Earth, leading to devastating consequences.

The Chinese plan follows a similar, yet slightly more costly, past proposal made by the United States. The NASA plan, called Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER), would send a fleet of 30-foot-tall (9 meters) spacecraft with battering rams to bump the asteroid off course. NASA simulations suggest that 34-53 blows from HAMMER spacecraft, launched 10 years before Bennu collides with Earth, would be needed to shift the asteroid.

NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) will be the first to test a novel asteroid nudging method in two joint missions launching November 24 of this year. The DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection) will send a spacecraft to arrive a year later at the 7 million mile (11 million kilometer) distant Didymos asteroid system. Once there, the NASA spacecraft will slam into Didymos's moonlet — a rock in orbit around the asteroid. The ESA's mission, Hera, will then monitor how DART has budged the moonlet off-course.


Bennu is a B-type asteroid, which means that it contains high amounts of carbon and, potentially, many of the primordial molecules present when life emerged on Earth. NASA already sent a spacecraft, called Osiris-Rex, in pursuit of samples from the asteroid. Osiris-Rex arrived above Bennu in October 2020, floating above it for long enough to collect loose pieces from its surface with its 10-foot (3 m) arm. Osiris-Rex is expected to return to Earth with its spoils in 2023.

Long March 5 rockets are the workhorses of China's space program, completing most of the deliveries to China's space station and launching Chinese probes to Mars and the moon. The rockets have caused concern in the past due to their uncontrolled reentry to Earth. In May, the 22-ton (20 metric ton) section of a Long March 5 rocket fell to Earth, either burning up or landing in the sea near the Arabian peninsula. In May 2020, fragments from a previous March 5 rocket were believed to have crashed into two villages in the Ivory Coast. Originally published on Live Science
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Reference: Dated Feb 17

Planetary Defense - DART - NASA Science

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), was the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration that validated one technique of asteroid deflection...
www.nasa.gov www.nasa.gov
Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission
The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration. While the Didymos primary body is approximately 780 meters across, its secondary body (or “moonlet”) is about 160-meters in size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth. The Didymos binary is being intensely observed using telescopes on Earth to precisely measure its properties before DART arrives.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1413211284774940673

https://twitter.com/x/status/1415017867863527430
BOLID #SPMN120721E ON THE COAST OF MOROCCO recorded last night July 12 at 22h58m49s TUC from Estepa (Seville) by Antonio J. Robles (@AJ_Robles ). It is extinguished after a big explosion @AstroAficion @GruposEstelares @astroamics @Vista_al_cosmos @AstroyFisica @FireballsSky

Meanwhile is it a Rock or a UFO..?
https://twitter.com/x/status/1414358900296585221
Luke Miller has on two occasions recorded by chance, flying objects that cannot be identified by the lens of his camera, when he wascapturing the Moon, from London,#Inglaterra . Astro Photography.#Photography#Moon#UfoBy: (Instagram).
 

UK Meteor Network Archive

Meteor Observation Data
archive.ukmeteornetwork.co.uk

Report Created: 2021-07-15 11:43:44 Snip:​

A total of 47 cameras recorded 81913 individual meteor observations and 2453 meteors were observed by more than one camera (Unified observations). A breakdown of unified observation counts by stream (top ten) is and where possible these were further analysed to determine the orbit and other details of the meteoroid. The number of unified observations as a percentage of individual observations is 2.9%. Click on the charts to see a larger version:
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Highlights:
Fireball Activity and Magnitudes
Velocity Distribution
Altitude and Distance
Orbital Analysis
Analysis of the trajectory and orbit was performed for unified events. The charts below show the distribution of semimajor axis amongst the unified events. Some showers show pronounced clustering of semimajor axis due to gravitational resonances, particularly with Jupiter. Extremely large values are also possible and often indicate that the meteoroid has been severely perturbed by close passage near a planet.
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Also shown is the position of the apparent radiant of each unified event. These should (obviously) cluster round the radiant of the shower but its normal for shower meteors to be a few degrees away from this, though its important to remember that for most showers, the radiant moves location each night due to the Earths movement through the debris stream. The matching process uses distance from the expected radiant to filter candidate events.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1414640515686051844

https://twitter.com/x/status/1414932135463505925

www.astronomerstelegram.org

The Astronomer's Telegram: We're Sorry!

www.astronomerstelegram.org www.astronomerstelegram.org
Small Apparent Outburst of comet 44P/Reinmuth 2
Reinmuth makes many close approaches to Jupiter. These close approaches gradually change its orbit. For example, on July 16, 2003, comet Reinmuth came within 0.74 AU of Jupiter.[1] This increased its perihelion from 1.89 to 2.11 AU and its orbital period from 6.63 to 7.07 years.[2] On February 11, 2039, Reinmuth will come within 0.52 AU of Jupiter, which will raise its perihelion to 2.44 AU and its orbital period to 7.78 years.[2] On July 21, 2063 and March 1, 2146, Reinmuth will come 0.43 AU and 0.51 AU, respectively.[1] Close approaches like these could raise Reinmuth's perihelion until it ceases to become a comet.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1415727854399102978

https://twitter.com/x/status/1415678048733519881

The hunt for planet-X (?) while Hubble's hardware (failure), comes back on line.

www.rt.com

Move over, Hubble! Russia to spend $50 million to build high-tech ultraviolet telescope to be launched into space in October 2025

Russia has allocated around 3.7 billion rubles ($50 million) to build a state-of-the-art space telescope with the ability to observe in ultraviolet, designed to see parts of the cosmos inaccessible to ground-based equipment.
www.rt.com www.rt.com
Russia has allocated around 3.7 billion rubles ($50 million) to build a state-of-the-art space telescope with the ability to observe in ultraviolet, designed to see parts of the cosmos inaccessible to ground-based equipment.

According to RIA Novosti, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and its subsidiary Lavochkin signed a contract to build the Spektr-UV, with work scheduled to be completed by the end of 2025.

The telescope is designed to use ultraviolet observe parts of space inaccessible to ground-based telescopes. It will be launched into space, in a similar way to the US’ Hubble, and will allow researchers to study stars, galaxies, and black holes, as well as the atmosphere of planets and exoplanets, and comets.

It will also be equipped with spectrographs and cameras to produce high-quality images.

The Spektr-UV is the second telescope announced by Russia this month. Last week, it was revealed that the Altai Optical-Laser Center was commissioned to build a ground-based optical-laser system to observe satellites, making it possible to assess their condition from Earth. It will also be able to determine what kind of equipment is on foreign satellites and detect space debris that threatens domestic equipment in orbit.

The telescope will be located in the Zmeinogorsk district of Altai Krai, chosen because of its atmosphere and beneficial observation conditions.

Earlier this year, Russian scientists launched a deep underwater telescope into Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume.

The equipment is designed to detect high-energy cosmic particles, and placing the device in a large body of pristine water, where there are no impurities, increases the chances of discovering them. With the newly discovered information, scientists believe they will be able to learn more about what happened in the universe billions of years ago.
 
sputniknews.com

Business as Usual: Huge Asteroid to Fly Through Earth's Orbit

The approaching asteroid is approximately 220 meters in diameter and is expected to travel past our planet at a speed of about 8 kilometres per second.
sputniknews.com sputniknews.com
The approaching asteroid is approximately 220 meters in diameter and is expected to travel past our planet at a speed of about 8 kilometres per second.

Yet another (relatively) close brush with a massive space rock awaits our planet in the coming days, according to NASA.
Coined "2008 GO20," the asteroid is expected to safely pass through our planet’s orbit on 24 July at a speed of about 8 kilometres per second.

The Daily Star, however, says there's an "extremely low chance" that the asteroid, which measures about 220 metres in diameter, "would make contact with the Earth's surface."
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The space rock in question belongs to the a group of asteroids known as the Apollo asteroids whose orbit crosses that of Earth.

JPL (2008 GO20) Trajectory.
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=
"For accurate long-term ephemerides, please instead use our Horizons system.This orbit viewer was implemented using two-body methods, and hence should not be used for determining accurate long-term trajectories (over several years or decades) or planetary encounter circumstances".

https://twitter.com/x/status/1416790722569723905
GREAT BOLID #SPMN130721E captured in color by Ramón López @StargazerLZT from Playa Blanca, Yaiza, Lanzarote on July 13 at 3:38 AM. Recorded from 1 station, it could be an unusual (for our latitudes) Foenícida of July. More details: http://spmn.uji.es/ESP/SPMNlist.h


https://twitter.com/x/status/1412750613625049088

https://twitter.com/x/status/1415589479889440768

https://twitter.com/x/status/1416533155524136960
Lin-1
It looks like the fireball that flowed at 3:38:05 on July 18, 2021 was seen with a wide-angle camera from Fuji toward the northern sky. It exploded in the middle of the route, leaving a faint green mark. It was a scattered fireball.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1416532228021002241
It was sunny last night and many meteors flowed. It looks like a meteor that flowed from the night of July 17th to the dawn of July 18th, 2021 was seen with a wide-angle camera from Fuji to the north. The meteors that flowed overnight are flowing all at once. Zeta Cassiopeia ζ meteor shower, Aquarius δ South meteor shower, Alpha1 Capricorni meteor shower, scattered meteors, etc. are shown.
 
The whole sky lit up over the south of Norway at 1am this sunday 25.07. Loud booms was also heard. Some friends and I was attending the freedom-party and saw it and couldnt quite figure out the weird fireworks in the middle of the night. :-) Yes, we at been consuming some wine so our awareness was rather dull.



 
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Fans of TexasStormChasers.com | Just saw this in Carthage, Tx | Facebook

Just saw this in Carthage, Tx. Cant tell it in the video but it was red. 8:57pm To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please contact publishers@storyful.com
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Mikha'El said:
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Fans of TexasStormChasers.com | Just saw this in Carthage, Tx | Facebook

Just saw this in Carthage, Tx. Cant tell it in the video but it was red. 8:57pm To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please contact publishers@storyful.com
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I had originally posted this in the wrong thread (my bad) and the caption is now lost to the winds.

This is video footage of the meteor that was witnessed over Oklahoma and Texas this past week.
 
gnosisxsophia said:
A Broken Cable Has Smashed a Huge Hole in The Arecibo Observatory
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A follow up on the doomed Arecibo Observatory!

Practical Engineering Jul 20, 2021 RT -17:57
On the morning of December 1st, 2020, one of the most iconic astronomical instruments in the world collapsed. The Arecibo Telescope was not only one of the largest radio telescopes in the world, it was also a fascinating problem in structural engineering. Its loss was felt across the world. This video provides a quick lesson on radio telescopes, a summary of the failure, and some discussion about the engineering lessons learned in the wake of the event. I hope that eventually, they can replace the telescope with an instrument as futuristic and forward-looking as the Arecibo telescope was when first conceived. It was an ambitious and inspiring structure, and we sure will miss it. Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!
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