Introducing the Asteroid Explorers Web Tool

By on June 8, 2015

Data is not information. As simple as this may seem, it is difficult for scientists to grasp, accustomed as they are to wade through mountains of data to eventually emerge with a gem of a fact. But scientists are a minority, and most people who land on the Minor Planet Center site through an online search or a link in a news piece about asteroids are regular folks who just want some info, like, are we going to get hit by an asteroid today? Or, how big are these Near Earth Asteroids that I hear might hit us one day? How easy is it to travel to one of these asteroids? And many more we’re yet to hear, I’m sure.

Well, dear asteroid fans, the Minor Planet Center teamed up with a group of volunteers from Oracle, and they have been hard at work over the past few months to bring you their Asteroid Explorers web tool. If you’re impatient, go have a play with it right now:

http://asteroid-explorers.com/mpc/

You can also watch the presentation by the Oracle team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (home to the Minor Planet Center), starting at 11:30 EDT on June 8 (or watch it later; it’ll be archived):

This journey began early in 2014, when a group of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge collaborators decided to set up an Asteroid Hackathon using the Minor Planet Center’s newly-created (and still in beta!) webservice. NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge Program Executive, Jason Kessler, planted the seed; the folks at EchoUser organised it and dealt with logistics, the SETI Institute hosted it, and SpaceGAMBIT put up the prize money for the winners. I did my bit to help out with the preparations, but all credit goes to these guys, who made it happen. I also attended the hackathon itself as the asteroid expert and one of the judges. It was great fun! I could tell you all about it, but why not let EchoUser’s Patrick Stern show you with this video recap he made:

Apart from the cash, the winning team would be given support by myself (and the rest of the Minor Planet Center if needed) to finish their project such that it could be incorporated into the Minor Planet Center’s website. It’s been a great, fun, and at times challenging, learning experience for all involved on this side of the Minor Planet Center (special credit and thanks goes to our lead programmer, Mike Rudenko, who’s put in many hours preparing data and the site to host this tool) and we all hope that anyone visiting our site will play with the Asteroid Explorers tool and leave with a little bit of knowledge about asteroids that they wouldn’t have otherwise gained.

I also wish to thank Oracle, who allowed the winning team to set up an Oracle Volunteer project in order to work on Asteroid Explorers.

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Interim Director Appointed to the Minor Planet Center

By on February 4, 2015

Dr Matthew Holman

Dr Matthew Holman.

As a follow-up to our announcement last month of the MPC director’s resignation, we can now confirm that the MPC’s host institution, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, has appointed senior astrophysicist, Matthew Holman, as interim director. It is expected he will fulfil this duty for the next 6-9 months.

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Minor Planet Center Director Steps Down

By on January 6, 2015

MPC Director Tim Spahr giving presentation at the UN

MPC Director Tim Spahr giving his presentation at the UN’s 50th meeting of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (©Julie Rottier).

Effective January 25, 2015, Dr. Tim Spahr will step down from his position as director of the IAU’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), which he was appointed to in 2006.

The Minor Planet Center is housed at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, who will be appointing an interim director until such a time as a new permanent director is found. In the meantime, MPC operations will continue as usual.

This is all the information we have at this time.

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Let’s Start 2014 with a Bang! Hello and Goodbye to Asteroid 2014 AA

By on January 3, 2014

Trajectory of asteroid 2014 AA before impact

Trajectory of asteroid 2014 AA before impact. The blue dot is Earth and the green line represents the asteroid’s trajectory, with small green dots spaced ~1 hour apart. Click for full size.

Discovery images of asteroid 2014 AA

Discovery images of asteroid 2014 AA, provided by the Catalina Sky Survey. 2014 AA is in the magenta circle. Click for larger animated version.

It was just another typical night dedicated to searching for Near Earth Asteroids at the Mount Lemmon observatory. Well, it was the first day (night) of the year, when most of us might have still been partying, but planetary protection knows naught about anthropocentric or heliocentric celebrations. Up in the 1.5m (60″) telescope was observer Richard “The Impactor Whisperer” Kowalski, discoverer of the only other asteroid, 2008 TC3, to have been observed before entering Earth’s atmosphere (back in October 2008). Shortly after 1:15am on January 1, he imaged an area of the sky where a small streak of light moved quickly against the background stars. Over the next hour or so he imaged that streak a total of 7 times and the positions of the asteroid were reported to us at the Minor Planet Center. We announced this new asteroid some 31 hours after the first observation and designated it 2014 AA, the first asteroid discovered in 2014. It was an NEA. It had already hit us.

This is no way to start a new year!

Luckily it was a very small asteroid, 1-3m across, which almost surely burned up in the atmosphere, with the most that could reach the ground being small fragments. From the initial orbit it was unclear where the precise point of entry into the atmosphere had been. Bill Gray, an asteroid software developer, provided the diagram below showing the possible atmospheric impact points stretching from West of Central America to East Africa:

Initial estimate of 2014 AA impact region by Bill Gray.

Initial estimate of 2014 AA impact region by Bill Gray.

[UPDATE 4 Jan.: See updated diagram from Bill Gray.]
As can be seen, it stretches about a third of the way across the globe. Later, Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario, triangulated the impact spot with much tighter constraints based on data from infrasound detectors used by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to keep tabs on who’s exploding what, where. His best estimate is 2014 AA disintegrated half way over the Atlantic, some 3,000 km East of Caracas, Venezuela, and 1,800 km West of the Cape Verde islands.

Can you imagine what it would’ve been like to ride on 2014 AA as it came towards Earth? No need to imagine because Pasquale Tricarico, of the Planetary Science Institute created this animation to show us:

Animation of 2014 AA's approach to Earth, by Pasquale Tricarico.

Animation of 2014 AA’s approach to Earth, by Pasquale Tricarico.

Given the location of the atmospheric disintegration of 2014 AA, it’s likely it met a lonely death with no witnesses. But even if this had taken place over a populated area, the small size of this asteroid meant it would have put on nothing more than a light show with no audible explosion or shockwave, and certainly no broken windows like the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 15, 2013. The energy of that explosion was estimated at 500 kilotons of TNT, while 2014 AA provided a lowly 500 to 1,000 tons (1/500th to 1/1,000th that of the Chelyabinsk meteor) according to Peter Brown’s estimates.

Let’s not forget that asteroids the size of a car enter the Earth’s atmosphere a few times a year—what’s special about 2014 AA is that we discovered it before it got here. Will we have to wait another 5 years to do it again?

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Sci-Fi Author Iain M. Banks Gets Asteroid Named after Him

By on July 1, 2013

Iain [M] Banks

Iain [M] Banks (©John Foley – Agence Opale)

In early April of this year we learnt from Iain Banks himself that he was sick, very sick. Cancer that started in the gall bladder spread quickly and precluded any cure, though he still hoped to be around for a while and see his upcoming novel, The Quarry, hit store shelves in late June. He never did—Iain Banks died on June 9th.

I was introduced to Iain M. Banks’s Sci-Fi novels in graduate school by a good friend who also enjoyed Sci-Fi; he couldn’t believe I’d never even heard of him and remedied what he saw as a huge lapse in my Sci-Fi culture by lending me a couple of his novels. After that I read a few more novels of my own volition because Mr Banks truly was a gifted story teller.

When I heard of his sickness I immediately asked myself what I could do for Mr Banks, and the answer was obvious: Give him an asteroid!

The Minor Planet Center only has the authority to designate new asteroid discoveries (e.g., ‘1971 TD1’) and assign numbers to those whose orbits are of a high enough accuracy (e.g., ‘5099’), but names for numbered asteroids must be submitted to, and approved by, the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN) of the IAU (International Astronomical Union). With the help of Dr Gareth Williams, the MPC’s representative on the CSBN, we submitted a request to name an asteroid after Iain Banks with the hope that it would be approved soon enough for Mr Banks to enjoy it. Sadly, that has not been possible. Nevertheless, I am here to announce that on June 23rd, 2013, asteroid (5099) was officially named Iainbanks by the IAU, and will be referred to as such for as long as Earth Culture may endure.

The official citation for the asteroid reads:

Iain M. Banks (1954-2013) was a Scottish writer best known for the Culture series of science fiction novels; he also wrote fiction as Iain Banks. An evangelical atheist and lover of whisky, he scorned social media and enjoyed writing music. He was an extra in Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

Asteroid Iainbanks resides in the Main Asteroid Belt of the Sol system; with a size of 6.1 km (3.8 miles), it takes 3.94 years to complete a revolution around the Sun. It is most likely of a stony composition. Here is an interactive 3D orbit diagram.

The Culture is an advanced society in whose midst most of Mr Banks’s Sci-Fi novels take place. Thanks to their technology they are able to hollow out asteroids and use them as ships capable of faster-than-light travel while providing a living habitat with centrifugally-generated gravity for their thousands of denizens. I’d like to think Mr Banks would have been amused to have his own rock.

Asteroid (5099) Iainbanks Orbit Diagram

Orbit Diagram of asteroid (5099) Iainbanks. Cyan ellipses represent the orbits of the planets (from closer to further from the Sun) Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. The black ellipse represents the orbit of asteroid Iainbanks. The shaded region lies below the ecliptic plane, the non shaded, above.

Note added 2013-07-10: Why this asteroid was not named Iainmbanks.
I have been receiving the same question over and over: Why wasn’t the asteroid called Iainmbanks, with his middle initial included? I thought I would clarify the matter here. One of the rules of asteroid nomenclature is that the name be a single word, pronounceable in a language. As such, Iainmbanks did not qualify. It was my first choice but I was quickly informed it wouldn’t fly, so Iainbanks it had to be. The other option was Iainmenziesbanks, which just seemed too wordy so I quickly discarded it.

There’s another rule that says you can’t name more than one asteroid after any given person, so I’m afraid one asteroid is all Iain is getting, and it will have to be without an M.

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The MPC Talks at the UN

By on March 8, 2013

The Scientific and Technical subcommittee of the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) held its 50th meeting this past February 11-22, 2013 in Vienna, Austria. Attending as observers were MPC director, Tim Spahr, and your humble author. During these meetings delegates from member states gave a summary of their country’s space activities during the past year as well as showing plans for the near future. It seems like the most popular theme was the establishment of GPS networks independent of the US’s NAVSTAR network, with China (Beidou), Russia (Glonass), Europe (Galileo) and Japan (QZSS) all boasting their own GPS project. Other nations reported on on-going rocket prototype launches, launch facilities, weather and environmental satellites, etc.

MPC Director Tim Spahr (left) giving presentation at the UN

MPC Director Tim Spahr (left) giving his presentation at the 50th meeting of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the UN's Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (©Julie Rottier).

More important to the NEO mission at hand were the meetings throughout these days of the Subcommittee’s Working Group on Near-Earth Objects, tasked with proposing international procedures to address the NEO threat. During these meetings, which all delegates could attend, presentations were given by appropriate member states on their involvement in the observation, tracking or mitigation of NEOs. Dr Spahr gave his presentation on Monday 18 about the role the MPC plays in the coordination of NEO observations and what we do with all the data we receive (calculate orbits, coordinate NEO observations, predict impending impacts, make it all public, etc.). The presentation was well received and we were approached afterwards by a number of people having questions to ask; with the meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk having occurred scarcely 3 days prior, interest in NEOs was understandably high. Being at the forefront of astersocial media, we were tweeting live from the UN floor; check out our #COPUOS-themed tweets.

Furthermore, meeting separately from the general COPUOS meeting was the Action Team on Near-Earth Objects (Action Team 14), chaired by Dr Sergio Camacho (Secretary General of CRECTEALC), which was tasked in 2001 with:

  1. Review the content, structure and organization of ongoing efforts in the field of near-Earth objects;
  2. Identify any gaps in the ongoing work where additional coordination is required and/or where other countries or organizations could make contributions;
  3. Propose steps for the improvement of international coordination in collaboration with specialized bodies.

The MPC participated actively in these meetings, whose final report was endorsed by the Subcommittee. In short, the report recommends the establishment of a network and two groups, described below. Beware, acronyms ahead.

International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN)

Formed through the coordination of institutions that already exist and are working on some aspect of the NEO issue: Discovery, cataloguing, monitoring, characterisation, etc. Specifically, they recommend “maintaining an internationally recognized clearing house for the receipt, acknowledgement and processing of all NEO observations,” which is precisely what the MPC has been doing since 1947. How convenient! IAWN will also recommend when and how impact threat notifications should be made and how to best inform countries’ leaderships of the consequences of an impact on their home soil. IAWN would also inform COPUOS and OOSA (the UN’s Office of Outer Space Affairs).

Special emphasis was placed on finding hazardous asteroids as far ahead of time as possible, and obtaining enough observations that their orbits can be accurately predicted many years into the future.

Impact Disaster Planning Advisory Group (IDPAG)

The organisation of this group will be initiated by IAWN; it will be charged with studying past large-scale disasters and developing action plans should an asteroid impact occur. It would be formed by representatives of existing national and international disaster response agencies.

Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG)

This group (pronounced same page) would be established by UN member states with space agencies and would be tasked with developing and implementing asteroid impact mitigation strategies through the promotion of studies and research into this field.

The flowchart below shows how all these entities would work together in case of a threat.

UN NEO Warning Network

Flowchart explaining the process of handling an asteroid impact threat as proposed by Action Team 14 of the UN COPUOS Working Group on NEOs.

  
To learn more about the Action Team’s recommendations, read the publicly available handout PDF. You can also listen to the press conference given by Sergio Camacho (Chairman of Action Team 14), Lindley Johnson (Near Earth Object Observation Program Executive, NASA) and Detlef Koschny (Near Earth Object segment manager, ESA) on 20 February 2013, where they talk about the recommendations of the working group and the recent Chelyabinsk airburst.

Alt text goes here

Working Group 14 press conference (©United Nations Information Service).

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The Flyby Clock: Visualizing a Century of Asteroid Encounters

By on February 6, 2013

Due to the interest sparked by the upcoming flyby of 2012 DA14, I thought it would be helpful to place its flyby in an historic perspective. To do so, I put together a visualization of all the flybys of known asteroids in the 21st century:

The flyby clock: All flybys of known asteroids in the 21st century. Click to see zoomable pdf version.

The flyby clock: All flybys of known asteroids in the 21st century. Click to see zoomable pdf version.

 

This “Flyby Clock” illustrates the close-approach distance (both of the nominal “best fit” orbit, and of the range of orbits allowed by current measurement uncertainties) of the closest-passing known asteroids as arrayed on the face of a clock spanning the years 2000 through 2100. Also illustrated are the approximate relative sizes of each asteroid.

A zoom-in on the central portion of the figure, showing the Earth's radius to scale (cyan circle) and the orbit of geosynchronous satellites (white ring). The trajectory of 2012 DA14 has been highlighted in this version.

The illustration shows a region centered on the Earth, and spans an area three times the radius of the Moon’s orbit. The Moon’s orbit itself is drawn for scale, as is the location of the orbits of geosynchronous satellites (approximately 42,164 km). The largest asteroid which passes within the boundaries of this plot over the 2000 – 2100 timespan is 1997 XF11, and it is approximately a mile across.

A zoom-in on this and last year, showing the names and relative sizes of recent and near-future Earth-buzzing asteroids. 2012 DA14 is visible.

One striking feature of this illustration is that before 2013 there appears to be many more flybys per year than after 2013. This is due to the fact that because these asteroids are so small and faint, our current facilities often only detect them during their close flybys. In other words, there are many, many more flybys that will occur in the 21st century but are not yet illustrated on this figure, simply because we have not discovered those asteroids yet. To the observatories!

 
There is a lot of information in this illustration, so the full version is linked here as a pdf (which allows zooming to see the finer details and names of each asteroid).

 

 

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Asteroid Mining and Planetary Resources – Our Take on It

By on July 9, 2012

If you have a minimum of interest in Space and Astronomy then you will have probably heard about Planetary Resources, Inc., the company that on April 24th 2012 announced their intention to mine Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). To get an idea of what they’re about you should watch their promotional video below before reading on.

 

If you want to watch the whole 1 hour announcement you can do so here; either way, in the following section I summarise their plans for you, as far as I understand them, in the order they plan to execute them.

 

The plan

  1. Launch a fleet of small, 9″ telescopes to survey the population of NEAs.
  2. Find the candidate NEAs most suitable for the mining of water.
  3. Bring them to Earth or Moon orbit, extract their water, then sell it (in space).
  4. Create a way to use hydrogen from the water extracted from asteroids as fuel to power ships and more mining equipment.
  5. Use this fuel and equipment to undertake the more difficult task of mining asteroids for valuable metals such as platinum (and also iron, aluminium, copper, etc., that would be useful as building materials in space).

Given timelines are vague, as they should be, but they expect to reach the platinum mining phase within 10–15 years. The question everyone is asking is Can this be done or is it science fiction? Unless somebody tries to do it, we’ll never know, but Planetary Resources faces some large obstacles along the way and it will be many years before their investments begin to pay off.

 

Who are these people?

I believe the reason Planetary Resources has not been written off as “a bunch of crazy people” is because of the names associated with the company, be it as investors, advisors or employees. Here are a few of them (in no particular order):

  • Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer: Formerly a NASA engineer, he was, amongst other things, flight director for the Mars Exploration Rovers Mission.
  • Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder, Co-Chairman: He is the Founder and Chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which in 2004 awarded the $10 million Ansari X Prize to SpaceShipOne for being the first private enterprise to “build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, twice within two weeks”.
  • James Cameron, advisor: Movie director and screenwriter, best known for his small indy movie Titanic. He enrolled into community college in 1973 to study Physics but dropped out.
  • Tom Jones, PhD, advisor: Former US astronaut, he obtained a PhD in planetary science from the University of Arizona.
  • Sara Seager, Ph.D., advisor: Associate Professor of Planetary Science at MIT, she studies the atmospheres of exoplanets.
  • Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., investor: Ex CEO of Google and currently their executive chairman.
  • Larry Page, investor: Co-founder of Google; does anything else need be said?
  • Ross Perot, Jr., investor: Son of Ross Perot, he is also a business man, currently Chairman of the Board of Perot Systems.
  • John S. Lewis, Ph.D., advisor: The man who started it all; professor emeritus of planetary science at the University of Arizona, he’s been advocating the usage of natural space resources for decades. His book Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets is probably on the nightstand of every Planetary Resources employee.

These are all successful entrepreneurs, business people, engineers, scientists…that have proven their worth in their chosen fields. These aren’t the type of people that you imagine meeting in some dark basement every first Saturday of the month and starting sessions with the mantra the first rule of Planetary Resources is you don’t talk about Planetary Resources. What you expect is to see these guys giving commencement speeches, talking on CNN, accepting awards and donating large cash amounts to charity. But setting up a space mining company?

 

Taking a closer look

These guys have moxie, I’ll give ’em that, but I want to throw some numbers out there to show that not everything that shines in their plan is gold, or platinum, as the case may be.

  • Mining equipment: Mining an asteroid for metals in space is different to mining on Earth, but you’re still going to need machinery. The only way you’re going to get it to the asteroid is on a rocket. Let’s assume the following (and it’s an expensive assumption, money-wise): they’ve brought the asteroid back to LEO (Low Earth Orbit); they’re using SpaceX rockets to launch their equipment and Elon Musk has achieved his goal of lowering costs to $2,000/kg taken to LEO. I don’t know what machinery they’ll take, but let’s look at your average Caterpillar excavator; depending on the model they weigh between 20 and 36.5 metric tonnes, but let’s assume they go with the lightest. Simple arithmetic (remember there are 1,000 kg in a ton) tells us it will cost $40 million to get one excavator to the asteroid. I don’t expect them to use off-the-shelf machinery like this because, among other things, you need engines that can run on solar power, not gasoline, so they’ll probably have to design and build their own equipment (and I’ll assume the weight of their space excavator is the same). That Caterpillar excavator costs around $250,000, and it’s mass produced, so expect whatever they substitute it with to cost at the very least $1 million to manufacture (and I’m going to ignore the several million it will cost to develop). How many will they need? I have no idea, but you can’t send just one because if it breaks, you’re without a paddle up the famous creek, so a bare minimum would be 3 so two can be working at any one time and you have a back-up. Some more arithmetic tells us that to build and send 3 excavators to LEO would cost $123 million, assuming all the above optimistic figures. Now think of how much more equipment will be required to actually mine an asteroid (drills, sifters, containers…), dispose of or contain the leftover “dirt”, then transport the precious metal safely to sea level. Furthermore, if the asteroid is to be mined in Moon orbit the expense of getting equipment there increases about tenfold, so now were talking $1.2 billion for 3 excavators. Add in about $2 million/year to run ground operations while we’re at it, and the costs of building and launching the fleet of Arkyd 100 telescopes discussed below. I can see start-up costs easily exceeding $1 billion.
  • Asteroid transport: The asteroid above was moved from its orbit around the Sun and taken into Earth or Moon orbit. That’s going to take a lot of energy! And nobody has an asteroid tug in their hangars, so that’s another craft that needs to be designed and built…and launched to the asteroid (see previous point on launch costs). Here’s something else to think about: asteroids spin, and smaller ones usually tumble (meaning there is no fixed axis of rotation). To move such an asteroid via physical contact (firing rocket engines attached to the asteroid surface, pulling it with cables, sticking it in a “bag” etc) would most likely require stopping its spinning motion, which is a whole other problem in and of itself (and would again, cost R+D money to accomplish). In fact, I see this as a major challenge because it involves new engineering and, like most of this enterprise, doing something that’s never been done before.
  • Arkyd 100 space telescope from Planetary Resources

    Arkyd 100 space telescope from Planetary Resources.

    Finding appropriate asteroids: Planetary Resources’ telescopes will be called Arkyd 100, a number of 9″ optical telescopes in Earth orbit that will search for new asteroids as well as monitoring known ones that could be candidates for mining to obtain more information about them. According to some early calculations performed by senior SAO astronomer Martin Elvis, to observe asteroids in the 50-100m size range the telescope(s) would have to be no farther than ~0.03 AU (~4.5 million km, 2.8 million miles) from the asteroid; that’s about 11.5 times the distance from Earth to the Moon. Looking at current flyby numbers (see sidebar) that means the telescopes would be able to observe only ~16 such asteroids per year! This value is based on currently known asteroids and current discovery rates for new ones; if Planetary Resources wants to survey enough asteroids to be able to choose an ideal one for mining they would have to discover many, many new ones. If a telescope cannot detect enough asteroids because they are too faint or far away, having 20 telescopes orbiting Earth isn’t going to improve its odds. The only way around this limitation is to place these telescopes along Earth’s orbital path around the Sun; in this way, if they have 20 telescopes spread out equidistantly, you’d expect them to observe ~16 asteroids per year per telescope, for a total of 320 per year, which sounds a lot better, but as a comparison, any of the current ground-based NEO telescope surveys observe several thousand of these 50-100m objects each year. By spreading telescopes out in this way they would certainly increase their chances of discovering new asteroids that wouldn’t be detected by Earth-bound telescopes at that time but it will be more expensive to build telescopes capable of orbiting on the other side of the Sun from us (and sending them there), especially when it comes to transmitting data back and forth. Do note these numbers are for asteroids 50-100m in size, which are at the upper range of what would be mineable; a 10-50m asteroid would be more manageable but harder to find. Of course, the Arkyd 100 telescopes would be able to observe larger asteroids too, which might not be candidates for mining, but could be potentially hazardous to Earth so their study is certainly a worthwhile endeavour.
  • Selling the spoils: As Martin Elvis aptly put it in a recent talk, in space, not only can nobody hear you scream, but there’s nobody to sell anything to. Planetary Resources’ economic model appears to be Mine it and they will come, but that places a lot of faith in private space industry, which would need to set up space hotels and frequent orbital flights that would require abundant water and fuel. A publicly-funded space program (be it American, European, Russian, Chinese or all four combined) will not have large enough needs to make the business profitable.

 

Conclusion

I don’t mean to pour cold water over this project, which is exciting and has the potential to inspire a new generation of school children to choose Asteroid Miner as their vocation for when they grow up; I just want to point out some of the harsh realities such an ambitious endeavour faces. The recent study released by the Keck Institute for Space Studies on the feasibility of retrieving a 7m asteroid and bringing it to Lunar orbit estimated the cost at $2.6 billion. That does not include the cost of mining! It’s just the cost of retrieval, and as I’ve shown, the actual mining could easily cost just as much. The upside is that, if successful, all this money could be recouped with the sale of mined minerals and profits could be huge. As has been said many times, this is the epitome of a high-risk, high-reward business venture.

The Mining Journal states the chances of bringing a raw [mine] prospect into production have been estimated at 1 in 5,000-10,000. What are the chances for a prospect in space? I’m glad it’s not my job to calculate that number and then have to go out to raise funds from investors. Nevertheless, I wish Planetary Resources the best of luck and truly hope they are successful. The MPC’s resources are all publicly available and I hope they make full use of them.

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Clearing Up the FUD on 2012 DA14

By on March 12, 2012

FUD, Fear Uncertainty & Doubt; that’s what surrounds NEA (Near Earth Asteroid) 2012 DA14 right now. As the organisation responsible for receiving, processing and cataloguing all observations of asteroids made around the world, we at the Minor Planet Center are in a unique position to understand the complexities of asteroid orbits and their possible encounters with our planet Earth. Hopefully I can distil our expertise and clear up all the false and misleading information regarding asteroid 2012 DA14 that’s floating around the internet and news lately.

Discovered by La Sagra Observatory (located in the province of Granada in Southern Spain) on February 23, 2012, asteroid 2012 DA14 is an NEA that gets as close as 134 million km (83 million miles) to the Sun, and as far as 166 million km (103 million miles) from it. This means it doesn’t cross the orbit of either Venus or Mars; this is important for reasons I’ll address later. Given its brightness (magnitude, as astronomers call it) we can estimate its size to be 25 – 75 m (82 – 246 feet) in diameter, which is another important factor. The folks at La Sagra have an article describing their discovery.

Let me start off by stating, in no unclear terms: asteroid 2012 DA14 will not impact the Earth next year. There will be a close approach on February 15, 2013 when the asteroid will pass some 40,740 km (25,320 miles) from the surface of our planet, just below the orbits of geostationary satellites and some 20,000 km (12,430 miles) above the orbits of GPS satellites. A week ago the distance being quoted everywhere was 27,000 km (16,736 miles); why is it now different?

When an asteroid is first discovered we usually only have a few days of observations to calculate an initial orbit with, which is accurate enough to allow for other astronomers to follow up the asteroid and send in observations, but nowhere near accurate enough to start crying Doomsday into cyberspace. Have you wondered why we at the MPC have been mostly silent about 2012 DA14? It’s because we were waiting for more observations. Right now we have 18 days worth of observations and we will continue to improve our orbit calculations as more come in over the days ahead, but we already know for sure there will be no Earth impact next year.

What about 2047?

Yes, it’s true, we currently have a scheduled close approach for the beginning of 2047, but it’s impossible to tell how close exactly it will be. Being the cautious astronomers that we are, we will wait until 2012 DA14 passes by next year and use the observations that will be made then to improve our orbit calculations. I’d like to note that it’s important to observe NEAs over long periods of time, many years, before we can start predicting their orbit decades into the future.

We’re lucky in one respect with 2012 DA14, and that is the fact it doesn’t approach either Venus or Mars (I told you I’d get back to this). Why is this important? When an asteroid passes close to a planet, the planet’s gravity will affect its orbit. The closer it passes, the more its orbit changes. We take this into account when calculating an asteroid’s position sometime in the future, but it’s always better if no wrenches are thrown into the cosmic gearworks. That said, our calculations indicate there is a possibility that after the February 2013 encounter the orbit will change enough for it to get closer to Venus than it currently does. We’ll know for sure in March next year!

All this said, while 2047 has been thrown around as the year of gravest danger, it isn’t even the closest approach we currently have scheduled. The JPL Earth Impact Risk page for 2012 DA14 lists 15 February 2054 as the closest of future approaches, and yet it only has a 1 in 59,000 chance of hitting us on that day. In 2047 the chances are less than 1 in 500,000.

Preparing for the worst case scenario

If this asteroid were to end up on a collision course with Earth on 2047, then what? My advice would be not to panic because, on a planetary scale, this is a small chunk of rock. Even if it were at the larger end of our size estimates, an object with a 75 m diameter would not survive its passage through our atmosphere and thus never reach the ground intact. What it would do is disintegrate some kilometers above the ground in a large explosion, which if it occurred over a populated area, would cause severe personal and structural damages. This isn’t something any of us want to see happen, which is precisely why the MPC performs the job it does. By watching this asteroid closely over the next few years we will be able to predict whether or not a 2047 impact is likely, and if it were, we would notify the scientific community and world at large; at that point we would have decades to work out how to avoid the catastrophe.

A year in the life of…

Click here (opens in new window) to see an animation showing a full year in the life of 2012 DA14 and Earth as they travel around the Sun on their way to the February 2013 flyby. The file is an animated GIF and rather big (55MB) so you might not want to open it if you don’t have a fast connection or are paying per MB downloaded. A smaller animation (click here, 1.2MB) shows a zoomed in area around the time of closest approach; the Moon is also included for scale. These animations are based on the latest orbit solution available and are updated as we receive new observations. As you can clearly see, there is no impact.

Ignore the media

Asteroid 2012 DA14 has made numerous appearances in the media since it was discovered. The MPC appreciates seeing possible asteroid impacts discussed in the news but we cringe at the incorrect and false statements being disseminated by some news outlets who we’d expect to be much better informed, some even going as far as to suggest there is the possibility of an impact. There is no debate amongst asteroid astronomers about whether 2012 DA14 will impact us or not in 2013—it won’t! 100% certainty. 0% chance. No debate.

We take our job very seriously at the MPC because we know the devastation an asteroid impact can cause and are committed to making sure we’re able to identify dangerous asteroids as early as possible. We also understand the damage generated by fear and mass hysteria brought about by false information. In the future, if you want to know what’s up with that asteroid they’re talking about on the news, come here to this blog to read an accurate report of the situation. And if we haven’t posted anything, feel free to contact us and ask. But whatever you do, don’t get your asteroid news from the News.

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The Flyby of Asteroid 2011 CP4 on 2012/02/23

By on February 13, 2012

Another close flyby will be taking place on the night of February 23rd. I know it’s more than a week away, but I thought I’d get a head start on the doom-sayers. This time we’re being visited by a rock about the size of 1.5 to 3.5 football fields (160 – 350 m), which would survive its passage through the atmosphere and reach the ground as a fair sized meteorite. Lucky for us, it will pass some 3.5 million km (2.18 million miles) from Earth, which sounds very far away, but in astronomical distances is quite close as it’s only a little bit more than 9 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.

2011 CP4 flyby on 2012/02/23

Diagram showing the orbit of asteroid 2011 CP4 in blue. Light blue is the part of the orbit that's above the plane of Earth's orbit while is dark blue is the part that's below. Note that the orbit of 2011 CP4 never crosses the Earth's orbit. The asteroid is shown at the point of its orbit when it's closest to Earth on February 23rd, 2012.

I’m providing a diagram of 2011 CP4’s orbit here (produced with JPL’s Small-Body Database Browser) so you can sleep at night without worry. Notice how the orbit of 2011 CP4 never crosses that of the Earth, which means it will never hit us. Unless it gets knocked off its path, but that’s unlikely! Again, sleep tight, the night won’t bite.

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