Lifeboat Foundation

Far below you lies a sphere of solid iron and nickel about as wide as the broadest part of Texas: the Earth’s inner core. The metal at the inner core is under pressure about 360 million times higher than we experience in our everyday lives and temperatures approximately as hot as the Sun’s surface.

Earth’s planetary core is thankfully intact. But in space, similar cores can collide with other objects, causing the crystalline materials of the core to deform rapidly. Some asteroids in our solar system are massive iron objects that scientists suspect are the remnants of planetary cores after catastrophic impacts.

Measuring what happens during the collision of celestial bodies or at the Earth’s core is obviously not very practical. As such, much of our understanding of planetary cores is based on experimental studies of metals at less extreme temperatures and pressures. But researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have now observed for the first time how iron’s atomic structure deforms to accommodate the stress from the pressures and temperatures that occur just outside of the inner core.

Dubbed 4660 Nereus, or 1982 DB, this vaguely egg-shaped asteroid has a size making it taller than the Eiffel Tower and nearly twice as tall as the Washington Monument. It is set to pass by the planet on December 11 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers and at a speed of 6.578 km/s.

For comparison, the distance between the Earth and the Moon is about a thousandth of that – around 385,000 km. As such, despite being classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) due to its size and close proximity to Earth, it seems unlikely to pose a threat to the planet.

In a concept test for an advanced planetary defense solution.

We are vastly unprepared for the event of an impending, potentially civilization-ending asteroid impact. Knowing this, NASA is developing planetary defense solutions to add to its arsenal of space technologies.

One of these technologies, NASA’s DART spacecraft, is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:20 Pacific time on November 23 a press statement reveals. … See more.

NASA planetary defender Dr. Kelly Fast has a hard and fast rule: “Find asteroids before they find us.” Working in NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Kelly is helping send the #DARTMission to test “nudging” an asteroid in space. DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous near-Earth object. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space. NOTE: the target asteroid is currently not a threat to Earth.

Get all the info on our #DARTMission: https://www.nasa.gov/dart

According to astronomers, several asteroids with diameters more than 10 meters collide with the surface of the solar system’s largest planet every year, causing explosions visible from Earth. Previously, such collisions were registered in 1,994 2009, 2,010 2012, 2,016 2017 and 2019.

If confirmed, this will be the ninth recorded impact on Jupiter since the first in July 1,994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 shattered into several smaller pieces, sinking one after another into the giant’s gas shell, leaving dark marks on the clouds of Jupiter, some of them the size of our planet.

Continue reading “A Second Object Crashed into Jupiter in Just One Month (video)” »

NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie “Armageddon.” Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.

The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary. It’s one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across — that’s Didymos proper — and a 160-meter “moonlet” in its orbit.

Continue reading “NASA’s ‘Armageddon’-style asteroid deflection mission takes off in November” »

Is Planetary Defense PI in the Sky?

In February of 2,013 skywatchers around the world turned their attention toward asteroid 2012 DA14, a cosmic rock about 150 feet (50 meters) in diameter that was going to fly closer to Earth than the spacecraft that bring us satellite TV.

Little did they realize as they prepared for the once-in-several-decades event that another bit of celestial debris was hurtling toward Earth, with a more direct heading. On February 15 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor, a roughly 62-foot (19 meter)-diameter asteroid exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, as it entered Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle. The blast shattered windows and damaged buildings, and nearly two thousand people were hurt, though thankfully no one died.

A giant asteroid almost hit earth on September 16 but because it came from the direction of the sun, scientists missed it.

If you heard a whooshing noise recently, you weren’t imagining it—there was indeed a gigantic asteroid that almost hit earth this month. And NASA didn’t see it coming.

Continue reading “A huge asteroid almost hit earth but NASA didn’t detect it until a day later” »

Talk about comets or asteroids coming anywhere near us and mind immediately goes back to what happened to dinosaurs. It just needed a space rock to end the reign of those fearsome reptiles who dominated nearly the entire foodchain. The asteroid that killed dinosaurs was just 10 kilometres across. But now a comet larger than Mars’s moons is speeding up toward the solar system.

Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is a mammoth! Remember Hale-Bopp? The comet that went around us in the year 1997? It was called a massive comet. And Bernardinelli-Bernstein is 10 times the mass of Hale-Bopp.

Also Read | NASA posts image of ‘Hand of God’, netizens are awestruck.