Lifeboat Foundation

An asteroid as large as Big Ben will be approaching Earth in January, 2022. However, it is not the only asteroid heading towards Earth.

The year 2022 has just started and here we are with dire NASA warnings of potentially hazardous asteroids heading for Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has reported that as many as five asteroids are coming towards the Earth in the first month of the year. An asteroid around the size if a bus will approach the Earth in the first week of January itself.

Asteroids, comets, and meteoroids are large rocks in space that orbit the Sun and occasionally vary their orbits due to the gravitational attraction of planets. When these space rocks do collide with any planet, it’s usually a disaster. That’s why, even when an asteroid with a diameter of more than 150 metres approaches Earth, NASA classifies it as a potentially hazardous asteroid and monitors it closely.

Continue reading “NASA raises warning of 5 asteroids heading towards Earth in January, 2022” »

We thought that all the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid hit the earth some 65 million years ago until recently. Now we know that some of the dinosaur species, mostly avians, survived and become birds. Scientists are trying to tweak chicken DNA to produce atavistic, dinosaur-like, traits that are embedded in the genes of birds for years.

A research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov conducted the first successful reversion of a bird’s skull features back in 2015. The team replicated ancestral molecular development to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory to turn its beak into a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.

“I wanted to know what the beak was skeletally, functionally and when this major transformation occurred from a normal vertebrate snout to the very unique structures used in birds,” Bhullar said.

The new system improves the capabilities of NASA JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies to assess the impact risk of asteroids that can come close to our planet.

But strangely, this green shade disappears before it reaches the one or two tails trailing behind the comet.

Astronomers, scientists, and chemists have been puzzled by this mystery for almost 90 years. In 1930, it was suggested that this phenomenon was due to sunlight destroying diatomic carbon. The carbon is created from the interaction between sunlight and organic matter on the comet’s head. However, due to the instability of dicarbon, this theory has been hard to test.

Scientists at UNSW Sydney have finally found a way to test this chemical reaction in a laboratory – and in doing so, has proven this 90-year-old theory correct. They solved this mystery with the help of a vacuum chamber, a lot of lasers, and one powerful cosmic reaction.

Meteorite impacts load the atmosphere with dust and cover the Earth’s surface with debris. They have long been debated as a trigger of mass extinctions throughout Earth history. Impact winters generally last 10 years, whereas ejecta blankets persist for 103–105 years. We show that only meteorite impacts that emplaced ejecta blankets rich in K-feldspar (Kfs) correlate to Earth system crises (n = 11, p 0.000005). Kfs is a powerful ice-nucleating aerosol, yet is normally rare in atmospheric dust mineralogy. Ice nucleation plays an important part in cloud microphysics, which modulates the global albedo.

According to a news release by The University of Manchester, a groundbreaking study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides new evidence that helps us to understand the asteroid impact that brought an end to 75 percent of life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs, at the Cretaceous-Paleogene transition 66 million years ago.

This project has been a huge undertaking but well worth it. For so many years we’ve collected and processed the data, and now we have compelling evidence that changes how we think of the KPg event, but can simultaneously help us better prepare for future ecological and environmental hazards.

Time of year plays an important role in many biological functions— reproduction, available food sources, feeding strategies, host-parasite interactions, seasonal dormancy, breeding patterns, to name a few. It is hence no surprise that the time of year for a global-scale disaster can play a big role in how harshly it impacts life. The seasonal timing of the Chicxulub impact has therefore been a critical question for the story of the end-Cretaceous extinction. Until now the answer to that question has remained unclear.

A huge asteroid the size of the Eiffel Tower is approaching our planet. The asteroid is named 4,660 Nereus and has been flagged ‘Potentially Hazardous’ by NASA. Nereus is 330 meters long and will break into Earth’s orbit on Saturday, December 11. The colossal asteroid is traveling at 23,700 km/h towards our planet.

On December 11, the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth. It will come within 3.86 million km, about ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Although it sounds like an enormous gap on cosmic scales, it is actually a stone’s throw away.

Continue reading “A Stadium Sized Asteroid Is Approaching Us This Weekend | Everything You Need To Know | Nereus” »

Circa 2013 o.o

Earth dodged a gigantic space bullet Friday when the 143,000-ton asteroid known as 2012 DA14 came within 17,200 miles of the Indian Ocean. Scientists and engineers are looking for ways to head off such close calls by targeting potentially dangerous asteroids well before they’re in a position to do us any harm.

A group called the B612 Foundation (a reference to the home asteroid of the Little Prince in the classic French novella) recently announced a mission to build a spacecraft that would track dangerous midsize asteroids, and a fledgling company called Deep Space Industries has floated a plan to build swarms of robots that could mine — and even destroy — space rocks.

Continue reading “Laser system could vaporize dangerous asteroids” »

An asteroid the size of the Eiffel Tower is heading towards Earth this month and it’s considered an especially unique piece of rock by scientists.

The asteroid 4,660 Nereus is classified as a “potentially hazardous” piece of rock because of its proximity to Earth. On Dec. 11, NASA expects it to be at its closest point to Earth over a 20-year period. The asteroid was discovered back in 1982.