Citizen astronomers map near-Earth asteroid | Astronomy.com
In the battle to defend the planet from hazardous asteroids, amateur astronomers have taken on a new role — for the first time, helping to map a near-Earth asteroid (NEA), revealing its shape.
The effort came as a collaboration between researchers at the SETI Institute and 26 citizen observers from seven countries who observed the 1.2-mile-wide (2 kilometers) asteroid 1999 AP10. All of the observers were using an eVscope — a new "smart" telescope model produced by the startup Unistellar .
Quite a lot has been going on:
Asteroid set to pass Earth in New Year as NASA reveals 'Near Earth' approach | Science
On January 3 2021, a space rock is set to swing by the orbit of our planet in what NASA is describing as a "near Earth" passing. The asteroid is known as 2020 YA1, and at 16 metres wide, it is bigger than a double-decker bus. Observations from NASA show that the asteroid is zooming through the solar system at an astonishing 3.7 kilometres per second - or more than 13,000 kilometres per hour.
While that may seem an almost incomprehensible speed, it is actually relatively slow for a space rock.
Asteroid News: $10 Quintillion Space Rock [Infographic]
Psyche was discovered back in 1852. It's one of the many objects in the asteroid belt just past Mars and it draws a little extra attention because it is much shinnier than the objects around it. Most asteroids are made of mostly rock and ice which can be somewhat boring. But an asteroid that is almost completely made of metal raises a few questions.
Since its discovery scientists have wondered how an object like this could form. The current theory is that Psyche is a planetary core that never formed a planet. It was in the process of attracting material when it collided with other objects that knocked all the rocky material off its surface and delayed the planet-forming process.
Feast your eyes on the space rocks Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission harvested from asteroid Ryugu
Japan’s ambitious second asteroid return mission, Hayabusa 2, has collected a wealth of material from its destination, Ryugu, which astronomers and other interested parties are almost certainly champing at the bit to play with. Though they may look like ordinary bits of charcoal, they’re genuine asteroid surface material — and a little something shiny, too.
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Although everything worked perfectly, the team could never really be sure they would truly get the samples they hoped for until they opened the sample collection containers in a sealed room back at headquarters. The materials inside have been teased in a few tweets, but today JAXA posted all of the public images along with some new explanations and discoveries.
Not to change the topic here:
Meteoric evidence for a previously unknown asteroid: Mineralogy points to large, water-rich
A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists has identified a potentially new meteorite parent asteroid by studying a small shard of a meteorite that arrived on Earth a dozen years ago. The composition of a piece of the meteorite Almahata Sitta (AhS) indicates that its parent body was an asteroid roughly the size of Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt, and formed in the presence of water under intermediate temperatures and pressures.
"Carbonaceous chondrite (CC) meteorites record the geological activity during the earliest stages of the Solar System and provide insight into their parent bodies' histories," said SwRI Staff Scientist Dr. Vicky Hamilton, first author of a paper published in Nature Astronomy outlining this research. "Some of these meteorites are dominated by minerals providing evidence for exposure to water at low temperatures and pressures.
Almahata Sitta Meteorites Came from Ceres-Sized Asteroid, Study Shows | Planetary Science, Space
The parent body of the Almahata Sitta meteorites — space rocks that rained down on the Nubian Desert in Sudan in 2008 — is a 640 to 1,800 km-wide water-rich asteroid that is as yet unknown, according to new research.
Hamilton et al . studied the composition of Almahata Sitta 202 to determine that it likely originated from a previously unknown parent asteroid. Image credit: Hamilton et al ., doi: 10.1038/s41550-020-01274-z.
In October 2008, a 4.1-m-diameter fragment of a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded 37 km above the Nubian Desert.
Asteroid treasure, COVID vaccine and public peer review
Hayabusa2 collected the samples during a year and a half of poking and prodding Ryugu — a small asteroid shaped like a squashed sphere, peppered with giant boulders. Ryugu is a C-type, or carbon-rich, asteroid, which scientists think contains organic and hydrated minerals preserved from as far back as 4.6 billion years ago. The samples could help to explain how Earth became covered with water.
"The samples containing precious asteroid material will provide scientists with key information about the formation of the Solar System," says Ed Kruzins, director of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which helped to track the spacecraft and its encounter with the asteroid.
Mysterious asteroid fragment is a time capsule from the early solar system
Back in 2008, a meteorite later named Almahata Sitta (AhS) crash-landed in Sudan. Now scientists have taken another look at this meteorite and believe it was part of a monster 9-ton meteor that exploded into 600 pieces in the atmosphere, and that meteor was probably hurled over here by an even more enormous asteroid. It's almost as if it flung a piece of the nascent solar system right at our planet.
Carbonaceous chondrites are also thought to be one source of the water that made it over here when things were smashing into each other in the chaos that was the early solar system 4.6 billion years ago. So are comets, basically huge balls of ice shooting through the void.
Happening on Twitter
In the face of the Chinese Communist Party's lies, Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan's uncensored reports from… https://t.co/cTAnTjAXLi SecPompeo Tue Dec 29 16:59:19 +0000 2020
BREAKING: @SecPompeo demands unconditional release of PRC citizen journalist Zhang Zhan jailed over reports about t… https://t.co/klXRvRX7mf bennyjohnson (from WashingtonDC/ New York City) Tue Dec 29 17:04:24 +0000 2020
For those of you that follow me and know how much I love the USA.... I want you to know that I am now officially an… https://t.co/F6ZCtwRAoP matthewdmarsden (from Los Angeles, CA) Tue Dec 29 20:45:36 +0000 2020
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